Game Narrative Kaleidoscope

March 9th, 2026 - Monday Post-Lunch Espresso, Fighting a Cold

Funny thing about Americans; we have a reputation for taking a lot of medication. But we also have a reputation for working too much and never taking sick days. Wasn't until I lived here that I put those pieces together.

Anyway, point is, I'm propping myself up with DayQuil Extra Strength today. I spent a lot of time around strange children this week; between a trampoline park on Saturday and the library on Sunday after the International Women's March I was probably exposed to every germ in the greater Helsinki area and I'm definitely fighting a cold of some kind. We push on though, best as we can.

In an exciting bit of news, I got my copy today of the Game Narrative Kaleidoscope - a published collection of 100+ essays about writing and storytelling in games, including one by yours truly on page 330.

If you want a copy of your own, check it out HERE; it's beautifully made and full of great essays about all manner of topics.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go sip my coffee quietly and wait for the DayQuil to kick in.

-e

Got my Hobonichi Techo for 2026!

March 2nd, 2026 - Monday Post-Lunch Recaffeinating

I've been using a Hobonichi Techo as my daily-use diary since 2017. They're beautifully-designed journals with hundreds of different covers available for purchase, all curated and created by Shigesato Itoi's company 1101. I love them because all the quotes and writing inside them have a fun, optimistic energy and it all just feels so thoughtful and precise. I used to get excited every year to see the new lineup, eager to pick out what would become my daily diary pal, but over time the cost of the base journal AND the covers all started to creep up and up and up. What started as a ~$50 investment for the whole package was soon creeping up towards more like ~$100. Especially if you wanted to get something nicer than one of the cheap vinyl covers.

A few years back I decided to invest in a nice leather cover and commit to the idea of just swapping in a new blank journal every year instead of always picking a new one. I do sometimes miss the joy of "which one will I choose!!" but it's also a nice removing of anxiety, and it makes it way easier to store my journals when I wrap up the year.

Unfortunately, due to COVID the cost of Hobonichi across the board got way higher. Then shipping and tariff insanity around the world made it worse again. Long story short, this year the Hobonichi Techo was costing a whopping $30-50 all by itself. And that's before shipping! I priced out buying nothing but the journal from 1101's site, like I usually do, and I would've ended up dropping about eighty bucks... so I made the surprising decision to go without. It just didn't feel worth it.

Fast-forward to this past week as I was settling back into my daily routine after returning from my horrible trip to the United states. Maybe it was the death of my father giving me a lot of feelings to sort through. Maybe it was just craving some attempt to return to a normal routine. Whatever the case I found myself really desperate to get my hands on a Hobonichi.

I discovered that there was one (1) store in the Helsinki area that stocked Hobonichi products - a little locally-owned shop called Mic & Mim's - and they had my Hobonichi Techo in stock for around forty bucks. Still expensive, but at least within the price range of what I was willing to pay.

But even within Helsinki, shipping was still going to cost at least 10 bucks! So I did what any sensible Hobonichi-craving writer would do: I saddled up my kid and we took the 40 minute bus ride out to Mic & Mim's to retrieve it in person.

So now I have my diary, my daily routine feels a bit restored, and I know the lengths I would go to save ten bucks.

Hope you're all well out there, whoever you are.

-e

Alysa Liu's 2026 Figure Skating Free Program

February 24th, 2026 - Tuesday Afternoon Espresso

Have you all watched Alysa Liu's Figure Skating Free Program from the Winter Olympics yet?

Because if you haven't, please click that link and remedy that. Good lord, it's so joyful. So fun. So free. There's someone who is an absolute world class athlete and performer who clearly loves what they do and loves sharing it with people.

We should all strive to take so much pride and derive so much joy from what we do.

-e

Four Years In Finland

February 23rd, 2026 - Monday Afternoon Lull

I passed a shocking milestone at the start of this month - we've officially been living in Finland for four years! By token of that logic, I've also been working at Remedy for four years. With the game industry being as buck-wild unstable as it is, that latter metric ain't nothing to sneeze at.

Being an "ex-pat" is nothing I ever particularly dreamt about. I didn't see living abroad as an aspiration or some sort of larger cosmic plan. I knew that living in a different country than where you were born was something you could do, but for whatever reason it just never seemed like I thing I would do.

Much less in Finland. And yet. Here we are.

Unfortunately, I didn't really get to make much pomp or circumstance about this anniversary as my father passed away very suddenly on January 25th and so I had to run back to the United States and spend the last three weeks in a strange haze of administration and mourning.

Terrible cocktail. Don't recommend.

I got back on Thursday and am definitely having a difficult time settling back in. Not least of which because my office is deserted today due to a combo of people being out sick or WFH.

Ah well. I'm sure it'll be busy again before too long.

In happier news, (low bar, amirite?) I also hit a career milestone this past month and signed with my very first literary manager for my animation + comic writing. I'm now repped (oo la la) at The Gotham Group which, no joke, has always been one of my dream agencies since I started working back in 2011. Very exciting, very honored. Weird month.

Anyway, we'll see where that leads. Hopefully to some exciting new stuff.

-e

A troubling amount of gambling

January 19th, 2026 - A sleepy Monday morning

One of the more bizarre new mindsets I've had to adopt in Finland is the fact that I go to the mall for everything. Grocery shopping? Mall. Eating out? Mall. Getting on the metro? Mall. Going to the doctor's office? Believe it or not, that's at the mall too.

Blame it on the terrible weather 65% of the year, but malls and indoor shopping centers end up forming a huge hub here in Helsinki. The one I go to for just about everything is a few blocks from us and called Kamppi. It's great; good spread of restaurants, shops, good grocery store, excellent metro stop. And just very clean and spacious. So much so that when my son was little and couldn't sleep I would sometimes bring him there early in the morning just to walk him around in his stroller.

It was on one of these walks around that he pointed out a shop - right between an off-brand Apple Authorized Seller and a Passport Photo place - that I had seen, but never really studied, to ask what it was. This happens a lot when you live in a foreign country. Assaulted by a constant barrage of foreign language, symbols, and abstracted cultural touchpoints, your eyes sort of glaze over and start filling in what things probably are. This is how you end up grabbing, not milk, but something called "sour yogurt drink" because it had the shapes and colors and general "vibes" of what your brain assumed would be milk.

But I digress.

This storefront my son was pointing out with interest had dozens of screens inside of all sizes and mounting configurations and, at this moment, were predominantly featuring images of horse racing. We were going through a big horse phase at the time, and so any sort of equine activity in the world was always met with great enthusiam. "Horsies!" he exclaimed. I couldn't disagree with him there. So we stopped and watching the horse racing through the window for a moment as I finally studied the place. With all the counters and screens I had always assumed it was some sort of cell phone or cable service provider; the clean lighting and white minimal decor certainly sound that idea as well. But as my son watched the horses go around the bend I realized that this was, in fact, a betting parlor.

Whenever I walk past the place now I always glance in curiously to see what the betting of the day is, and I'm always amazed to see how many people are inside placing their wagers. I'm from the United States where betting and gambling still has an air of, if not mystique, then at least a certain amount of seediness, and so the knowledge that such a place is just sitting there mere storefronts away from baby supply shops and bookstores jangles me a bit. It's kind of like when I moved back to Los Angeles in 2018 to discover legal marijuana dispensaries with the clean lines and aesthetics of an Apple Store. All legal, but years of association were hard to shake.

Finland, as it turns out, has a pretty serious gambling problem, with somewhere between 4-5% of adults having a degree of gambling addiction and there being constant calls for more regulation. It should be easy to do, as Veikkuaus (the company who owned the betting parlor I saw) has a monopoly on betting parlors, slot machines, and other "gambling-related devices or companies," but Finns are also getting slammed constantly by ads on buses, TV, social media, etc. for gambling apps or websites from other countries where the regulations are absolutely nil.

I have a growing concern, however, that Finns are not an outlier here. The United States is going through it's own plague of sports betting apps, gambling sites, slot machines... And these are just the companies that are honest about the fact that they peddle in gambling. Look at the world of video games - especially "free to play" ones - and you'll see a cess pool of microtransactions, loot boxes, "spin the wheel," and more all designed to pull people's wallets into ever inescapable whirlpools of chance.

These worries came to a head for me this past weekend when I was taking my son to his swimming lessons on Saturday morning. At Kamppi (there again!) a huge coralled area had been set up for something called "King Colis." Inside the corral were hundreds and hundreds of unmarked cardboard boxes of all shapes and sizes. I originally assumed that these were part of some display still to be opened and assembled until I noticed that people were digging through the boxes, with an enormous line of people waiting to do the same.

I'm a deeply curious person by nature, so I couldn't help googling this "King Colis" to see what it was, and learned that it's a company that collects lost or abandoned parcels from shipping companies... and then allows people to buy them by the kilo - blind to their contents. I checked the prices and was stunned. To buy a "premimum 15kg package" is upwards of 300 euros. With absolutely zero guarantee that what's inside will be worth anything nearly that.

I tracked down an article talking about this company, their IRL lootboxes, and the customers who buy them, because I needed to know why people were buying. What did they think they were getting. And the answer across the board seemed to be that people were hoping to get something more valuable than what they had paid so they could resell it. It was the same strange optimism I had seen across cryptocurrency, NFTs, Pokemon Cards, Beanie Babies... now applied to literal junk.

There's clearly something about gambling that is perfectly sized to fit into a certain slot in the human brain. That notion that YOU could be the lucky one. That YOU will be the one that picks the diamond from the rough and will be rewarded for it. Not because of anything you particularly did, but because of just innately special lucky YOU. And if won't be you this time, then by Jove, certainly the next time! Roll again! Drop another coin in the slot! And we're at this dangerous unregulated point where companies are taking advantage of that to the hilt and running for all they can, until the regulation crackdowns eventually come.

Because, god, I hope they do come. Things are too bleak and too hard for people to resist the promise of getting rich quick. The hope that this horse race will be the one that turns everything around. That this digital bit of fluffery ends up being worth something in the end. That this mysterious cardbox holds, not garbage, but the secret key to a better life. It's all the same magical thinking repackaged over and over again, and the result is always the same: the house always wins and the rich get richer.

Hopefully when my son is older this period of time will be looked at the same way we look at old cigarette ads - Can you believe we used to advertise gambling to kids in mobile games? said with the same tone as Can you believe doctors used to recommend cigarettes? - and he'll just have these vague memories of seeing betting parlors on our trips around the mall. I think there were video screens with horses? It was at the mall?

I'd be willing to bet that life will still center around malls though; Finns are letting that shit go anytime soon.

-e

I swear I used to be excited about technology

January 8th, 2026 - drinking a bitter morning coffee

There's a picture of me from 1990 at 2 or 3 years old, not even out of diapers, poking away at the keyboard of an IBM home PC. I had my first email address before I'd lost all my baby teeth. All of my early animation, art, game development, was all done with computers. As far back as I can remember, I've always loved computers and the internet and the amazing potential they represented for creating things and connecting with people around the world.

All through my teenage years and into my 20s, I'd follow news about this new gadget, that new computer. I'd religiously watch Apple keynotes and keep tabs on all the new announcements with a feeling of excitement about what they represented and what could be next.

But now?

Every new tech announcement, every new company, every new piece of hardware, makes me suspicious now. I wonder how a new product will be used for surveillance, how "AI" will be stuffed in, how something will be subscriptionized, monetized, monopolized, to squeeze every ounce of profit out of the user's experience... We've gone from computers and technology eliciting a sense of wonder to being the harbingers of dread and exhaustion.

And the exhaustion is the worst part of it, really. I feel a duty to protect myself, my work, my family, my child, from being exploited and manipulated by new technologies but doing so requires so much vigilance and attention, and I worry that at a certain point my stamina will run out. And if does, what new technology will suddenly slip under my radar and into my or my family's life?

These are the sort of paranoid thoughts I thought I would never have about technology, but here I am in 2026 worrying about digital monsters lurking in the shadows.

But I try to stay optimistic.

Yes, technology increasingly scares and exasperates me. But I'm trying to find small ways to embrace and go back to the version of technology that I liked. Things like doing this blog entirely in HTML and not posting about it anywhere. Or only listening to full albums as opposed to algorhythmically-generated infinite playlists. It takes more work, but it's more satisfying. The friction is what makes it feel like you did something. And reconnecting with that, realizing that's a value of mine, has been worst something I think.

What a world, I think to myself. What a goddamn world. But we're doing what we can.

-e

New Year, New... Something

January 7th, 2026 - vaguely around pre-lunchtime

I'm back at the office and, hoo boy, is my brain not into it! I've got no meetings, things are kind of directionless, but I'm sure they'll be busy again in no time.

On the bright side, I've gotten a lot of other random things crossed off my to-do list. And I discovered a neat new musician named Chloe Qisha.

I think I'll go eat some lunch now and see if that helps things.

-e