James Cavin Writes

Navigating the teleological terrors which assail creativity in the current age.

The results were pretty weird.

One of the things that I do instead of driving fast cars and dating supermodels is collect interesting quotes.

A quick followup to my previous post about Russel Hoban's The Hungry Three series!

My friend Lars likes to use the phrase, "Garbage in, garbage out."

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.

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'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?)

See Part One here! Time to break some more table tops! (and also my face...)

Some more Vim for you, fresh from the fetid jungles of the imagination!

I saw a ghost once.

( Read Part Two here. ) I don't normally post first drafts of personal writing, but I submitted an in-progress short story for last week's Operation Garbage Fountain , and, as per my agreement with fellow garbage-fountainier Lars Doucet , I am contractually obliged to write about it online.

For only 5 of your human minutes, you can experience the glorious pulp horror comedy splendor that is Interview with an Ichthyologist Itch.io! (Did I mention that you can get a pet fish-puppy to smite your enemies?)

Temple Run: Legends was a really interesting challenge in general, but the trickiest part was definitely the limited time events that the design team wanted to do as post-launch content.

Our premise is simple: Don't try to use story to contradict everything else that the player sees and does.

  There's a finite amount of text space in your game. It's a terrible shame to waste any of it.

In all its rugged splendor. This is a brilliant book, and you should buy it. I was reading Gene Wolfe's Castle of the Otter (a collection of essays and advice named after a humorous misreporting of the title of his book Citadel of Autarch ), and two pieces of advice really stuck out to me: 1) Write a story every day. 2) Buy the New York Times Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused, & Mispronounced Words – it's really cheap.   Also an $8 find. I thought, "Okay, but he wrote that back in the 80s. I bet this book is a collectors' item now." Then, I looked it up on Thrift Books. It's only eight dollars! 8! That's, like, half a latte. You could buy three and juggle them! One, it's awesome if you're reading Gene Wolfe, because when he uses a word you don't know (approximately every other sentence), you have the dictionary that he was using right here in your hand. Secondly, you now possess a normal-book sized dictionary with readable size text tha...