Writing

I tricked my parents into a gaming laptop to "type my novel," played games for three years, faked just enough progress — and somehow ended up a published author.

At 24 my income hit half a million and my time for myself hit an all-time low. Here's exactly how the money happened — and why I walked away from it anyway.

I still can't really sing. But I went from tone-deaf to carrying a tune and actually hearing pitch in songs — and that part felt like a cheat code for the brain.

Not by being the best engineer in the room. By quietly taking the unglamorous work everyone else was avoiding.

Not fluent — functional. Twenty tracked hours bought me about a thousand of the right words and the door into immersion. Here's the honest mechanism, and what it pointedly did not buy.

I'd done everything right for six months and the scale wouldn't move — until I stopped treating it like a willpower problem and started treating it like a bug.

After 100-plus hours behind the screen, I think the magic isn't the dice or the lore — it's a handful of frameworks for making a world that's already moving when the players walk in.

What makes a game a perfect object — and the handful that hit it for me. Mostly an excuse to think out loud about design by way of the things I can't stop playing.

At my financial peak I was lonelier than I'd ever been — so I quit, lost almost everything, and spent a year figuring out what a life is actually for.

I optimized for the grade at every school I attended, and it worked — which is exactly the problem.

Not willpower — a method: find where the common advice is wrong, build a feedback loop, and let sleep do the heavy lifting.

A roguelike about poker hands has more to teach about game design than most textbooks. Here's what it gets exactly right — and what it taught me to want to build.

I read like it's a syllabus I set myself — not to collect books, but to build with them. Here are the few that actually changed how I operate, and the one idea each one gave me.