Foundation – Quality of Life Update 1: A Fresh Start in Greenshire

So, despite recently diving back into EVE and getting that old familiar itch for Caldari steel and space pirates, I still wanted to make room over the weekend for something a little calmer. A little greener. A little less likely to pod me. And that meant heading back into Foundation, a city-builder I’ve already sunk just over 50 hours into (so far), and one I keep finding myself returning to when I want that meditative “one more tile” flow. I've still got a long wait to go to push pass the 518+ hours spent/sunk/wasted/enjoyed in Cities Skylines though!

And the timing couldn’t have been better, because the first Quality of Life Update 1 just dropped (last Wednesday, November 26th) and honestly? It’s a nice little upgrade pass that fixes a bunch of those small frictions you don’t notice until the game quietly removes them. The devs even call it their "more freedom, less friction" update. That's exactly what you'd call it!

I actually hit pause on my current village, Brackenwood (above screenshot), right as the update landed.

Something about the new tools and cleaner systems made me want a real fresh start, so I wiped the mud off my boots and founded a brand-new settlement: Greenshire. New land, new plans, new opportunities. You know the drill.

Here’s what the update brings us...

Back through the wormhole: rediscovering New Eden after all these years

A funny thing happened when I started cleaning up my blog a few weeks back. I was just “archiving” old EVE Online posts, fixing dead links, swapping in updated YouTube videos… totally innocent stuff. Right... And then, somehow, I found myself dropped straight into the deep end of the nostalgia pool. One minute I’m fixing a broken link or looking for a working link to an EVE Fanfest video, the next I’m getting bombarded with “Come back to EVE!” ads like Hilmar had personally noticed my footsteps into my EVE archived content.

And honestly? The pull was too strong. 

Mix in that "Making of EVE Online" documentary, and the full-on marketing push for Catalyst, CCP’s latest expansion, and resisting New Eden became a losing battle. So I took a peek. Just a tiny one. And, well, you can guess where this is going.

I’ve only been back in the game for, what, the better part of a week now? But it already feels like that surreal combination of coming home and discovering someone completely renovated the place. Sort of like driving by your childhood home. The neighborhood layout is the same… everything else has been upgraded.

The Creator, AGI, and that weird feeling we’re living in a prologue

There’s been a lot of fiction built around the eventual arrival of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), what some folks still call the singularity(*). That mythical moment when the lights flip on, the machine looks back at us, and suddenly we’re not the only conscious thing in the room. Hollywood has had a field day with it: The Terminator, Ex Machina, Ghost in the Shell, Westworld, and now The Creator.

And this last one hits different. It dropped right as chatbots landed in our daily lives. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. Suddenly these tools weren’t some far-off sci-fi fever dream. They were… well, they were right here, answering our emails(**) and helping us plan vacations and occasionally confabulating(***) nonsense like an overconfident toddler.

That overlap of fiction colliding with reality has always fascinated me. It’s the moment where the stories we’ve told ourselves for decades start brushing up against the world we’re building, sometimes intentionally, sometimes by accident.

When the stars still whisper—"The Making of EVE Online"

I wasn’t even aware this documentary existed. It came out long after I’d hung up my pod and left New Eden behind. I found it on YouTube purely by chance while cleaning up the blog and archiving my most-read EVE posts (I was looking to replace broken links to videos from old posts). 

And just like that, I was back. "Watching The Making of EVE Online" felt like stepping into an old corp hangar and finding the ships that carried me (and many of you) through wars, scams, and sleepless mining ops that blurred into dawn. Well, more of the latter in my case!

So, what keeps a 2003 MMO still relevant twenty-something years later? Simple: EVE Online was never built to simply entertain—it was built by design to endure. This documentary, produced by The Escapist and featuring CCP Games longstanding CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, as well as veteran CCP devs, captures that impossible dream—a tiny Icelandic team daring to create a single universe where every action, alliance, and betrayal mattered.

It all started with an audacious vision: one single-shard world where everyone played together. No realms. Just a single server. Just Tranquility. A place where loss had meaning—ships destroyed didn’t respawn, and every wreck told a story. That idea turned EVE into something more than a game—it became a living record of human ambition, greed, and ingenuity. The film revisits early sparks: infamous heists, decade-long wars, and legends like Katya Sae’s journey across all of New Eden.

Cause that’s the heart of it all, the players. The players ARE the content.

Monday night spotlight: The Lost Tower — A quiet, haunting gem of Blender sci-fi

I’m kicking off a new Monday night spotlight series. Think of it as a weekly dive into animated (and occasionally not-animated) short films that punch way above their runtime. Little cinematic gems. World slices. Those “wait, why isn’t this a full movie yet?” moments we all love. I have a bunch of old ones I'll need to dig from my archives of liked videos. 

And for the very first entry, I had to start with something that recently grabbed me instantly.

That something is The Lost Tower, a Blender short by concept artist Florent Lebrun.

A pilot, a plane, and an ocean full of ancient secrets

The premise is almost meditative, a lone pilot gliding above uncharted waters, searching for one of the fabled Lost Towers. No narration. No lore dump. Just atmosphere thick enough to bottle.

Lebrun’s painterly touch is everywhere: soft haze, massive structures half-buried in mist, and that beautiful tension between loneliness and discovery. It feels like a keyframe from a forgotten French sci-fi graphic novel… the kind you’d find wedged between Moebius collections and some obscure out-of-print RPG manual.

It’s not action-packed; it’s evocative. And that’s exactly why it works.

ASTRA ARCANUM — First look at a solar-system RPG with some serious grit

 I'm launching a new series for the upcoming TTRPG from Metis Media / Creative

Every once in a while, a TTRPG trailer drops and you just feel your brain whisper, “Yeah… we’re gonna need to talk about this.” That’s exactly what happened when ASTRA ARCANUM rolled onto my radar.

If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the Release Trailer that kicked off my whole descent into the Solar Reach. 

Go ahead, I’ll wait...

…Right? I know.

Reflections on "Dune: Part Two The Photography"

Latest addition to my Dune collection: Dune: Part Two – The Photography.

I first saw David Lynch’s Dune in the late ’80s, long before I truly understood what spice, prophecy, or politics meant. It was strange and mesmerizing, more bizarre dream than story. Later, in college, I devoured Frank Herbert’s novels, and that’s when his universe truly came alive in my imagination — a vast and fragile ecosystem of power, where politics, mercantilism, and religion intertwined with prophecy and war. It was a story of humanity stretched to its limits: empires built on faith and fear, knowledge traded like spice, and intelligence evolving into something both divine and dangerous.

But for decades, every adaptation felt slightly out of phase with what I’d imagined — like trying to hold onto a dream that dissolves the moment you wake. Lynch’s film had its merits, flashes of brilliance even, but it never quite captured the spirit of Herbert’s universe I had imagined. The later television miniseries, though ambitious, was almost unbearable to watch. Over time, I began to accept that no cinematic version would ever align with the mental landscape I’d built through years — decades — where the map of that universe improved in my mind with every reread.

Then Denis Villeneuve came along.

Rebuilding the Star Wars prequels | From myth to consequence

Like many lifelong Star Wars fans, I wanted to love the prequels. And in a way, I did, really, for their ambition, their worldbuilding, their intent to tell a grand political tragedy. But even back then, something always felt hollow. They were visually dazzling but emotionally distant. Beneath the endless CGI, the high-concept politics, and the (over-the-top) lightsaber choreography, I couldn’t feel the humanity that made the original trilogy timeless. Never mind the dialogues that fell flat.

To me, the prequels were shallow not because of their story, but because of how little truth they allowed to surface. They wanted myth, but they forgot consequence. They wanted destiny, but abandoned choice. It all felt too sanitized:  a story of corruption and collapse told without dirt, sweat, or moral weight.

So now, years later, I've decided to revisit them — not to “fix” Star Wars, but to rediscover what made it real to me in the first place. What if the fall of the Republic felt like something we could believe — a slow, procedural death of democracy and faith, rather than a fireworks show of villains and chosen ones? What if the Jedi weren’t superheroes but weary monks, spies, and diplomats caught between faith and bureaucracy? What if Anakin’s fall wasn’t inevitable, but painfully human?

That’s the heart of this project — a rewrite of Episodes I–III that reimagines them through the grounded realism of Rogue One and the moral gravity of Andor. The spectacle fades. The consequence remains.

The prequels didn’t fail because of what they tried to say — they failed because of how they said it. Beneath all the gloss were the bones of a masterpiece: the death of democracy, the corruption of faith, the rise of tyranny. 

Those bones were strong — they just needed to breathe.

Here's how I imagine things...

Why Blue Eye Samurai cut so deep & why I can’t wait for season 2

Every once in a while, a show slices through the noise and reminds you why you fell in love with animation in the first place. Blue Eye Samurai did that for me.

From the very first frame, that painterly Edo-era Japan bathed in blood and moonlight, I knew this wasn’t just another revenge story. It’s an emotional blade honed to perfection: sharp, purposeful, and heartbreakingly human. Mizu isn’t a hero; she’s an instrument of fury shaped by a world that refuses to see her as whole. And yet, beneath every duel and dismemberment, there’s this quiet ache, the question of what’s left when vengeance burns everything else away.

It’s Kurosawa meets Kill Bill, but with the moral complexity of Andor and the tragic beauty of Princess Mononoke. The choreography is poetry. The dialogue cuts like truth. And the craftsmanship (the light, the pacing, the music, etc.) it all screams that animation can be cinematic, adult, and profound without needing to apologize for it.

Season 2 can’t come soon enough. Not just to see where Mizu’s path leads, but to watch this creative team keep redefining what “animated storytelling” can be. 

If Season 1 was the strike, Season 2 feels like it'll be a reckoning.

Anyone else feel like this show reignited their faith in what animation can say?

The Wind Princess (A Nausicaä tribute worth your time)

Seven years. A small team of friends. And a shared love for Hayao Miyazaki’s art.

“Nausicaä – The Wind Princess” isn’t a Studio Ghibli production, it’s a Brazilian-made, self-funded labor of love. Every frame was crafted as a heartfelt tribute to Miyazaki’s world of wind, courage, and compassion.

It’s a reminder of what happens when passion becomes purpose.

🎬 Watch it. 

Feel it.

And if Ghibli shaped your imagination too, this one’s going to hit you right in the heart.

Enjoy!