January 17th, 2025 ― Veney has been dormant for a while. In my lackadaisical, mixed approach to spitballing 1. improvements on the “main” game, 2. variant rules, and 3. experimental proof-of-concept twists on basic chess concepts toward my sorta overall thesis, I’ve ended up with an unwieldy, disorganized list of crazy ideas. It’s been over a year since the last veney update, and I have a blog now, so I figured why not dump ’em here? Enjoy!
Read more →︎January 11th, 2025 ― This’ll be a quick one, I think. We’ve probably all heard enough about Dune. I haven’t really read it with any depth (abridged audiobook four years ago) and my whole Dune take is not relevant. Furthermore, there aren’t actually any broken swords involved. There aren’t swords at all, as a matter of fact―we’re talking here about knives. Daggers, more specifically. Blades, anyhow. They’re used and spoken of breaking in a dueling context synonymous with a heroic swordfight.
Read more →︎
January 1st, 2025 ― Just came across this image and figured I’d upload it. The idea here was to make a set of chess pieces distinguished by minimal cuts into blocks of wood, which kinda fell apart when it came to the king and queen. The rook, knight, and bishop make allusions to the classic piece shapes, but when it came to the king and queen, I didn't really know how to make a similar move without...
Read more →︎
December 14th, 2024 ― I remember sometime back in the early 2000’s, age 12 or 13, I was in a movie theater lobby and saw an arcade game that stopped me dead in my tracks. It had a controller shaped like a sword hilt attached by a cable to the cabinet and a frame of motion sensors surrounding where the player stands. “This is it,” I thought, adjusting my large eyeglasses designed for a cartoon turtle, “Video game sword... They finally did it.” I put all the money to my name into the machine and picked up the controller, ready to meet destiny...
Read more →︎December 12th, 2024 ― I just remembered something funny. 10‒12 years ago, I had an idea for a short piece of writing about a computer program that could produce visual art. Someone invents it, the images it spits out are compelling, or at least popular. Everything changes, [insert speculative fiction here]. I never really thought it out much further than that. There was no element of the machine working off of “prompts” or using a database of imagery to replicate. Probably if I was more tuned in to the development of neural networks already underway at that time, I could have connected the dots better and seen something more relevant to what’s happening now. All I was imagining was a somewhat linear algorithm that would run through a huge flow chart of combinatorial factors and produce a resulting abstract image. I think I wanted these abstract images, in the fiction, to have some kind of sublime quality that captivated masses of people...
Read more →︎
November 8th, 2024 ― A few months back, I wrote this thing. The idea of it came to me by surprise one night while I was fussing in the kitchen, watering plants, like a message beamed into my brain from outer space: “They asked the machine that’s killing the world about chess, and it said Black has a forced win in ▒▒▒,▒▒▒,▒▒▒,▒▒▒.”
If you’re very-online, you may be familiar with this phenomenon in relation to microblogging. You spend so much time cooking up weird little zingers (perhaps this is a condition that mainly affects people who were really into twitter between 2010‒2016) that they start creating themselves...
Read more →︎
October 22nd, 2024 ― A story about psychic communion with giant bugs, colossal flesh golems, and our spiritual relationship to fungus may not immediately cry out to you for any sword-focused analysis. I would agree that Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) is not really asking you to think about the swords, and the reason I love it so much has almost entirely to do with the bugs, the fungus, and the golems. However, there is a lot of talk in Nausicaä about materials for weapons and armor―the actual substance of swords breaking...
Read more →︎
October 15th, 2024 ― This the first issue of “Swords Broken,” a series of blog posts about broken swords in media, reality, myth and tradition, parable, et cetera. I’ve got roughly 15 more of these TK in a planning doc. Let me know if you have a broken sword moment I should cover!
Read more →︎[ Site went live 10/02/2024 ]