James Cavin Writes

Bam! Pow! Zap! Other sounds of beeping and blooping digital destruction! From Spacewar! all the way back in 1962 up to the present day, an overwhelming number of videogames are devoted to (or heavily feature) violent combat of some kind. It's something for which modern social critics and game designers often feel a kind of shame. “Surely, this is what's holding us back from true respectability as a grown-up medium,” we whisper in the shadowed booths of hookah lounges and bratwurst bars*, "This must be what makes us not quite as good as movies. Why are we so devoted to violence?” *Or wherever we hipsters nest these days. It’s easy to write this off with a simple "because teenage boys are the primary demographic, and teenage boys are awful." However, I think there’s a little bit more going on under the hood here. A quick aside: What do we mean when we say “game”? For our purposes, I'm go...

Happy Friday! For those of you to whom reality provides an insufficient amount of psychedelic, grave-robbing shenanigans amongst the rusting hulks and inhuman powers of the fallen future, I have another slice of Vim! ...Poor Grit the Quill is out of the snake-siege and into even greater insanities. If you'd like to start the narrative of our brain-damaged-eunuch-scribe-turned-tomb-raider/something-less-than-reliable-narrator from the beginning, you can find the first two chapters here: ( Read Part One here. ) ( Read Part Two here. ) And now, without further ado, Part 3! PREPARE YOURSELVES FOR WEIRD. The stone is sharp. They bring the infants up by helix steps to cast them down upon its point, and in that fall they read the fate and future. Such was my dream that I dreamt as we lay below the moon-glowing mirk and waited to be killed. The old wound hurts greater than the new. These are not my thoughts. They were germs on...

Thanks to an unexpected bout of insomnia last night, I am currently operating with approximately 3.5 hours of sleep. I also have 39 pages of rambling, incoherent, hand scrawled notes for something called The Cleverest Beast , which apparently felt very compelling in the wee hours of the morning. I have transcribed those notes here because, you know, why not? Without further ado, I give you the deranged ramblings of the Hyde-esque antimatter alter ego who apparently takes control of my faculties once I cross the insomnia event horizon: Here beginneth the account of Zombie James According to an interesting article sent to me by a friend, Franz Kafka believed that insomnia (from which he suffered most of his life, in case you couldn't tell from his million yard stare and/or the fact that everything he wrote was a waking nightmare) was a great artistic tool. I don't know how much I wish to base my life on Kafka's (for one, I'd like ...

I've got another bit of madness for you! For some reason, I've been in kind of a swordfish mood lately… (Is this what being trapped in an artistic rut* feels like?) *On the plus side, my swordfish-themed-cover-art-skills seem to be improving. Anyways, this one's definitely a rough draft, so if there's anything that feels like it ought to be cut, just say so! Without further ado... At 3:37 PM, Thursday, 37 years ago, the stuffed swordfish over the mantle piece began to weep. The tears were black, slightly viscous, and described by those present as smelling strongly of sandalwood and turpentine. When the tears had not abated by 4:42, but had instead begun to pool on the hearth in what threatened to be a permanently-staining manner, Madame Z_____________ sent for the priest (the local gendarmerie and Madame Z_____________'s lawyer having already been summoned but failing to arrive in a timely manner.) The priest...

See Part One here! Time to break some more table tops! (and also my face...) Note: If the following diatribe here is a little confusing, it’s probably because of the probable microconcussion that I probably gave myself this morning when I walked straight into the corner of the bathroom wall as I tried to grope my way blindly to the toilet at 4:23 a.m. (I still haven't cleaned up all of the blood.) Side note: if my most noticeable facial scar comes from trying to pee, I'm going to be very put out. Anyways, on to being terrible and cursed and wretched! Last time I talked about this super janky little “Dark Souls style cursed kingdoms of the wretched and undead” minimalist RPG system that I threw together for Garbage Fountain, and I promised the 1.25* of you who actually read the post that I was going to upload rules next time, and behold, next time is here. *We lost .25 due to tariffs. So, without further ado (or cranial trauma) here’s how you ...

This is but Part One - See Part Two here! Let's break some tabletops! (By applying videogame narrative design tactics!) The theme of this garbage fountain was "Ghost," which got me thinking about all sorts of old, weird ideas that have been bubbling around in the back of my head, alongside commercial jingles from 1992 and a vague sense of unease about the approaching heat death of the universe. Anyways, under the duress of creativity, I decided to once again cheat on videogames and dabble in the forbidden waters of tabletop. (If videogames wanted faithfulness and fidelity, she wouldn't lay off half the workforce every 16 months.) Plus, the infamous Drive-thru RPG (world-renowned for both being the largest tabletop RPG storefront on the Internet and also committing unforgivable spelling crimes against the Honorable English GH) was having a weird contest, and if there's one things that I love more than ignoring the appro...