The year of the blog? + how to easily put a Bluesky feed widget on your website

V Buckenham has declared that this is the year of the blog. I suppose I shall answer the call. It must be so.

I used to blog with shocking regularity -- at my peak (or my lowest point?) I was writing 2-3 posts a week. I can't imagine doing that now. But maybe I can commit to a 2-3 posts "every now and then"?

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As long as we're strolling down memory lane: my most loyal readers may recall this blog used to have comments and a personal Twitter feed in the sidebar. I'm not bringing comments back, but I've gone ahead and added a personal Bluesky feed widget that displays a few of my most recent posts in the sidebar -- just like it's 2010. (If you're reading this on mobile, you'll have to switch to the desktop version to see the sidebar.)

Figuring out how to add a Bluesky feed widget was surprisingly complicated to figure out, but then very simple to execute. Useless google searches would have you believe that you have to sign-up for a weird widget scam service with a fake free plan, and the official Bluesky website only offers tools for embedding an individual post as a widget.

But if you can paste HTML, then you too can have a free and easy Bluesky feed widget on your website or Blogger or Wordpress or whatever. Here's my very authoritative guide:

New game announcement: "Tryhard" + "A Sportslike Manifesto"

Tryhard is an upcoming sports RPG about managing an underdog rugby club in New Zealand.

We're still quite early in development. But for now, it'd really help us if you wishlisted the game on Steam or idled in the Discord, mostly so we can show those stats to convince rich people to give us money to finish making the game.

If you're interested in why we're making this game / what's going on...

"What's on your bookshelf" at Rock Paper Shotgun

Just a brief update here -- I recently had the honor of participating in Rock Paper Shotgun's "what's on your bookshelf" interview series.

It's one of my favorite gaming journalism things happening at the moment, full of interesting book recs and observations from smart people like Alice Bell, Josh Sawyer, and Xalavier Nelson Jr. Check out the full series listing here.

The implication is that I too am also a Smart One. And indeed filling out the questionnaire made me realize I mostly read non-fiction these days. I suspect an English literature degree turned me into a snob. I'm so disconnected from modern popular book culture (e.g. BookTok) where some game devs like Holly Gramazio are making new careers as authors writing fun books that people actually read. I'm jealous! I want to read and write fun things too!

re: the unannounced rugby project, it remains unannounced. It's intended to be a more commercial game, and in business-land apparently you're supposed to be careful about when you start talking about something. All I'll say is -- I've been interested in horniness and sports for a while, and embracing sport is probably one of the next big "trends" in queer culture. Hopefully this game won't miss the peak.

On "Sudden Death" by Cecile Richard, nat_pussy, and isyourguy

As a fellow gay Australian Rules Football gamemaker, I am honor bound to write about Sudden Death by Cecile Richard and nat_pussy with help from isyourguy -- a 30-45 minute "romantic sports fiction" interactive fiction / visual novel about an underdog Aussie footy team doing crimes and gayness. Yet beyond matters of honor and gayness, there's still plenty more to recommend about it.

Sudden Death was originally released for Domino Club, an occasional month-long game jam with anonymous submissions. Eventually you're allowed to out yourself -- turns out the now-revealed Cecile Richard and nat_pussy have made lots of Bitsy and Twine-like works already, and all that experimental queer storytelling experience shines through here.

SPOILER WARNING: vague spoilers, nothing specific.