https://sorakalden.com/blog/ Essays, stories, and opinions from Sora Kalden — a rabbit hole, not a portfolio. en Thu, 02 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT https://sorakalden.com/blog/flua-index/ https://sorakalden.com/blog/flua-index/ Thu, 02 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT I understand about 40% of everyday spoken French — one continuous, checkable number instead of an alphabet soup. What it means, how it's measured, and why its entire value is that it refuses to flatter me. https://sorakalden.com/blog/book-at-14/ https://sorakalden.com/blog/book-at-14/ Sun, 21 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT 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. https://sorakalden.com/blog/half-million-at-24/ https://sorakalden.com/blog/half-million-at-24/ Sun, 21 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT 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. https://sorakalden.com/blog/learning-to-sing/ https://sorakalden.com/blog/learning-to-sing/ Sun, 21 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT 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. https://sorakalden.com/blog/promoted-2-months/ https://sorakalden.com/blog/promoted-2-months/ Sun, 21 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT Not by being the best engineer in the room. By quietly taking the unglamorous work everyone else was avoiding. https://sorakalden.com/blog/japanese-in-20-hours/ https://sorakalden.com/blog/japanese-in-20-hours/ Sat, 20 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT 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. https://sorakalden.com/blog/debug-weight-loss/ https://sorakalden.com/blog/debug-weight-loss/ Fri, 19 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT 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. https://sorakalden.com/blog/dnd-peak/ https://sorakalden.com/blog/dnd-peak/ Fri, 19 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT 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. https://sorakalden.com/blog/games-i-love/ https://sorakalden.com/blog/games-i-love/ Fri, 19 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT 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. https://sorakalden.com/blog/quit-250k/ https://sorakalden.com/blog/quit-250k/ Fri, 19 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT 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. https://sorakalden.com/blog/schools-forget/ https://sorakalden.com/blog/schools-forget/ Fri, 19 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT I optimized for the grade at every school I attended, and it worked — which is exactly the problem. https://sorakalden.com/blog/thirty-day-method/ https://sorakalden.com/blog/thirty-day-method/ Fri, 19 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT Not willpower — a method: find where the common advice is wrong, build a feedback loop, and let sleep do the heavy lifting. https://sorakalden.com/blog/why-balatro/ https://sorakalden.com/blog/why-balatro/ Thu, 18 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT 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. https://sorakalden.com/blog/books-that-rewired-me/ https://sorakalden.com/blog/books-that-rewired-me/ Wed, 17 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT 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.