2025: Finding my way back to writing, one post at a time

It’s that time of year when I take a step back and look at what actually happened over the last twelve months.

Going into 2025, I fully intended to blog more consistently. In reality, that consistency only really showed up in the last four months — and if I’m being completely honest, it’s mostly been the last two.

And yet, despite that slow restart, this blog saw more life this year than I expected.

This wasn’t a year of volume. It was a year of re-entry.

After long stretches of relative quiet, 2025 became about finding my rhythm again — figuring out what I still wanted to write about, what felt forced, and what I kept coming back to even when no one was asking for it. Writing sorta stopped being something I planned to do and slowly became something I did again.

When passion shows in every detail: Zlín City: Arch Moderna

 

I just finished watching the "Zlín City: Arch Moderna" announcement trailer for the nth time, and wow, it hit me with a full-on wave of nostalgia.

Visually, it doesn’t feel like a typical city builder at all. It feels like a miniature world on a table — the kind I obsessed over as a teenager, building my own model train layout piece by piece. Laying down tracks. Placing buildings just so. Tweaking little details until the whole thing clicked and felt alive. That same quiet, tactile satisfaction is all over this trailer.

ASTRA ARCANUM — Part II: Where the pressure actually lives

Artwork by Eren Arık (Metis Creative), originally shared via ASTRA ARCANUM Developer Logs.
All Rights Reserved.

After my first look at ASTRA ARCANUM, I went back and spent more time with the project’s Developer Logs. Not trailer but the actual dev logs from Kickstarter: the messy, in-progress stuff where systems are still being argued over, broken, rebuilt, and occasionally thrown out.

That context matters, because everything below is very much in the works. These aren’t promises etched in stone. 

They’re design intentions, openly shared while the game is still being shaped.

What follows is a breakdown of the key ideas emerging from the developer logs — all very much still in progress.

Making sense of PvP in EVE Online: Merlin ship fitting and skill training

I’ll be upfront: this is fairly new territory for me. Not EVE Online new of course, but more like spaceships new. More like small-ship PvP fundamentals, up close, personal, and a tad more complicated. That part is definitely new.

So I’ve been dabbling, searching, and reading lots. Asking questions about fitting ships. Undocking. Going for PvE missions. Then re-docking. Staring at my ship's fitting, trying to decipher it all like if they we’re ancient runes, and hoping to understand not just what works, but more importantly, why it works.

This post is me trying to make sense of it all — out loud. So bear with me.

If I’ve misunderstood something, I genuinely want to know. If I’m on the right track, I’d like that confirmed too. Either way, I’m hoping some veteran PvP pilots will help steer me in the right direction. Maybe after having had a good laugh at my expanse.

Housekeeping, and a clearer sense of where this blog stands

If you’ve only been reading this blog recently, you might not know how far back it goes, how long of a journey it was to get here.

It started in 2005, back when blogging felt like pulling up a chair at a truck stop, and seeing who stuck around for a conversation. And boy oh boy were there a lot of those way back when.

Since then, life happened. Got married. Kids suddenly became top priority (obviously!). Careers shifted. Priorities changed. The pace slowed, picked up, slowed again. And even crawled to a stop at some point. The blog never really went away though, but it did gather a bit of dust.

Over the past little while, though, I’ve been writing again in a more deliberate way. Not chasing volume, but following curiosity. Digging into things that stuck with me. That meant posts about coming back to EVE Online with older eyes, breaking down ship fittings and early PvE lessons, but also stepping back to look at why that universe still works the way it does. It meant long-form takes on city builders and strategy games — Foundation, Frostpunk, Surviving Mars — not as reviews, but as systems worth understanding. It meant writing about science fiction again, from Arcane to Avatar, Dune & Star Wars, from space travel concepts to the stories I keep returning to with the kids.

After taking the time to look back at the history of this blog, its numbers, and its long, uneven arc, I realized something: the writing had moved forward over the last few months, but parts of this site hadn’t quite caught up.

So over the last little while, I’ve been quietly cleaning things up.

Nothing dramatic. No rebrand. No “big comeback.” Just the kind of work that happens when you care about a place and want it to reflect what’s actually happening inside it.

Finally heading back to Hawkins, one last time

Now that we’ve wrapped up Arcane Season 2, and with my daughter on holiday break, we’re finally diving into the fifth and last season of Stranger Things. It’s been waiting patiently on the list, and there won’t be a better moment to start watching it! 

I’ll share some thoughts once we’re through it all, early in the new year.

Back to the Upside Down.

Foundation: a beginner’s guide to setting up a successful first hour

Before you place a single building, you’ve already made the most important choice of the run.

You want the obvious stuff: wood, stone, berries. That’s table stakes. But the real early-game hero is fish. A river or coastal start gives you a food source that’s reliable, low-maintenance, and doesn’t require processing chains. Fish buys you time — and in Foundation, time is everything.

If you’re playing your first serious game, don’t crank difficulty or custom rules. This isn’t about proving you’re clever. It’s about learning how the systems breathe.

You don’t place roads. You let them happen.

This is the first mental reset Foundation (get it on Steam) asks of you.

There is no road tool. Villagers create paths simply by walking where they need to go. Those paths harden over time into roads. Your job isn’t to design infrastructure — it’s to encourage movement.

Avatar: Fire and Ash — Back to Pandora once again

Some movies just settle into your family rhythm, and Avatar ended up becoming one of ours. 

My better-half and I first caught it in theaters back in 2009, and years later, once the kids were old enough, it turned into one of those films we’d rewatch together, over and over. It just stuck. Especially with the kids.

When The Way of Water arrived, we made it a family outing on IMAX; the kind of big-screen moment you don’t forget. And because we clearly hadn’t had our fill, I went back a second time with the kids. They were all in, and honestly, so was I.

Now that Avatar: Fire and Ash is landing this December, we’re keeping the family tradition alive. The four of us will be there, heading back to Pandora like it’s a place you return to whenever you get the chance. And in a way, we have, every time we could. Between big-screen and home-screen rewatches and our 2018 visit to the Pandora attraction at Walt Disney World, it’s become one of those worlds that quietly works its way into your shared family history.

Eywa’eveng yìt ftu frakrr!

From wanderers to warp bubbles: why ‘Go Incredibly Fast’ feels like the next chapter

How Erik Wernquist and Dr. Harold “Sonny” White carry Carl Sagan’s spirit of exploration into the physics of tomorrow.

Directed by Erik Wernquist | Written by Erik Wernquist & Harold “Sonny” White | Narrated by Harold “Sonny” White | Music by Cristian Sandquist

For as long as we’ve had fire and stories, there’s been that one person staring past the edge of the village, wondering what’s out there.

“Go Incredibly Fast” feels like a love letter to that restless few — the wanderers who traded coastlines for continents, continents for worlds, and now, worlds for stars.

The short film, created by digital artist Erik Wernquist for the Limitless Space Institute, is narrated by aerospace engineer and warp-drive tinkerer Dr. Harold “Sonny” White. It’s less than five minutes long, but it plays like a quiet manifesto: a reminder that the open road never ended at the shore. 

It just moved… up, way up, into the stars.

It starts with a future that feels strangely ordinary.

We’ve made it to the Moon. To Mars. Maybe there are families in lava-tube suburbs on the lunar far side, kids kicking dust at the edge of a Martian canyon, people commuting between orbital habitats the way we take the bus.

Jump clones in EVE Online: A beginner’s guide to clone mechanics

 

Inspired by “Medical and Jump clones made easy!” by Gildy (see his video guide below) — updated using CCP Games + EVE University sources.

If you’ve ever felt totally lost navigating EVE’s clone mechanics, you’re in good company. The system changed so many times over the years that most “old wisdom” floating around today is either half-true or straight-up obsolete. So let’s walk through what clones actually are now — clean, current, and stripped of all the old baggage.

Jump clones in 2025 — what they're really all about

First things first: today’s clone system is simple. No more clone grades, no more skill-loss anxiety, no more spreadsheets to figure out which body can hold how many skill points. A clone is just your empty body waiting for your consciousness. That’s it.

Looking back on Arcane and the experience of watching it together

We’ve always had a family tradition of watching animation together — Studio Ghibli was our starting point when the kids were little — and Arcane naturally found its place in that same rhythm. Season 1 pulled us in from the start — the MiniCKs and me, all equally curious about where it was heading. The art, the pacing, the characters; everything felt richer than we expected. When we started watching Season 2 at the start of the year, my eldest and I decided to continue watching it together. We went back to Season 1 partly to enjoy the story with fresh eyes, and partly because we’d forgotten more than we realized. By episode three of Season 2, the number of pauses we were taking made it obvious we needed a full rewatch of the first season.

(No actual spoilers here — just reflections on the experience. But you may want to wait to read until you're done with both seasons.)

Watching the show again only reenforced our appreciation for the mesmerizing visuals: Arcane’s quality isn’t an accident. The animation is breathtaking in a way that makes you want to print still frames as paintings. Fortiche didn’t just animate a story; they built a world that breathes. There were scenes where I found myself thinking, I’d hang this on a wall. That doesn’t happen often with television.

But beyond the visuals, it’s the characters who carry everything. Vi and Jinx, especially, sit at the heart of the show. Their relationship is complicated, painful, and believable, and it anchors both seasons. Even when the story branches out into politics, mysticism, and the deeper mechanics of Hextech, it always comes back to the people affected by those forces.

How that twenty-year-old Gears of War teaser still grabs my attention

There’s a moment I keep circling back to.

You’re in a room full of noise, everyone talking over each other, and then you notice there's one kid alone, sitting in a corner, speaking barely above a whisper. And somehow, that’s the voice you end up focusing on.

That’s what the original Gears of War teaser did back in 2006.

The whole industry was in ‘bigger, louder, flashier’ mode, and then along comes this short, almost fragile trailer set to the Donnie Darko-era ‘Mad World’ cover by Gary Jules. A lone soldier. A ruined city. No shouting, no hype. Just a mood that landed harder than all the big-budget noise around it.

It didn’t push itself into your face.

It didn’t have to.

It said what it needed to say quietly, and that was enough.

Caelin Kinotsuki: Caldari survivor. Callsign "Crazy Kinux"

I’ve never been deep into the roleplaying side of EVE Online—not like the pilots who fully live their New Eden personas every time they log in. (Is that still a thing?) But I’ve always liked giving my characters at least a bit of background. The old RPG player in me still enjoys a good story.

With my current character, Crazy Kinux, there was a chance to do something that actually tied the “Crazy” and the “Kinux” together. I played around with a few ideas, and the version below is what I settled on.

Curious what you think. Do you roleplay at all in EVE?

Caelin "Crazy Kinux" Kinotsuki

Caelin Kinotsuki, aka Crazy Kinux or CK for his inner circle, grew up near the refineries of Haajinen, in a family that had worked for Kaalakiota’s Extraction Division (KKeD) for generations. Mining was the expected path, and he took it without hesitation. Though certainly far from the glamorous military career some would hope for, the work was steady, the crews were close, and for a Caldari, it felt like contributing directly to the strength of the State.

For years, Caelin lived the standard extractor’s routine—long shifts, quiet camaraderie, and the simple satisfaction of meeting quotas. 

That ended the day his crew was caught in a Gallente ambush.

They were operating in a contested border system, running a routine extraction. Nothing unusual. But with tensions high between the State and the Federation, a Gallente strike group jumped in and misidentified the wing as a Caldari recon element. They attacked immediately. 

Caelin survived only because his pod was thrown clear during the first pass. He drifted for hours before a State patrol recovered him.

Everyone else in his crew was gone.