Vorpal Coil

Was describing herself as a living doll before doll fiction was a whole thing linktr.ee/vorpalcoil

[vorpalcoil]

Backrooms (2026)

[vorpalcoil]

Backrooms was enjoyable whenever it was about exploring weird rooms and struggled when it had to deliver on characterization and plot, save for that dinner scene, which felt like a meeting in the Black Lodge.

[cryptotheism]

Have you studied enough alchemy to synthesise The Dialectic Material?

I've got an ingot of pure context on my side table

[vorpalcoil]

Thinking through the implications of worldbuilding is great fun as long as you don't tie yourself up into knots over it. Some people have just convinced themselves that it's always bad as a kneejerk reaction to a subset of fandoms getting dogmatic about it.

[vorpalcoil]

The bag is almost empty… time to eat the pfinal Pfeffernuss.

[vorpalcoil]

"Cortisol", "dopamine", everyone casually throwing around words even neurologists barely understand like they're the new bodily humors. I'm putting the names of neurotransmitters on a high shelf until everyone's ready to play with them responsibly.

[vorpalcoil]

"You don't hate X enough"

Don't you try to launder your anger issues through me.

[vorpalcoil]

CRTs have a specific look to them that older games were often designed to optimize for, but that's not necessarily true of modern pixel art games and they're not inferior for it. People have taken a fact about past art and made it into a false limitation for future art.

[vorpalcoil]

"I didn't see you at the club"

Well I didn't see you at the

[vorpalcoil]

Rewatched Lady In The Water for the first time since it came out and I am vindicated in my belief that it was always a good movie. People were only convinced it was bad by critics who review-bombed it because they felt like it attacked them.

[vorpalcoil]

Yes, the names are silly, but that's superficial. The critic character is (spoilers) killed, and critics interpreted it as a threat to them because they poorly reviewed Shyamalan's prior film – a petty reason to treat an engaging and sincere film like it was The Room. The other criticism was the director played a secondary character prophesied to write an important book, seen as self-aggrandizing – but not only had he always played a minor role in his prior films, but it's a movie in which everyone has a magic destiny, that was the premise.

There are aspects of the film that could be better: the dialogue is stilted at times, and the cinematography could have done more with color. Yet criticism focused on matters external to the craft and experience of the movie itself, refusing to engage with it on its own terms.

[vorpalcoil]

Rewatched Lady In The Water for the first time since it came out and I am vindicated in my belief that it was always a good movie. People were only convinced it was bad by critics who review-bombed it because they felt like it attacked them.

[vorpalcoil]

Last night I finished a year-long Delta Green campaign. In the end I was corrupted by the King In Yellow and rewrote the play to contain a nested recursive play within it. One of the other investigators chose to hurl himself out of a window. Good times!

[vorpalcoil]

Into the rules of Immanent Domain, a TTRPG of magitech revolutionary uprising. From what high tower does the tyrant oppress your people? Up on the Patreon now.

[vorpalcoil]

Having fun writing the list of fictional ores and gems you can dig up in Deep Time - I'm getting to use some notes I took years ago and haven't have a chance to use until now. I'll put up a post with them on my Patreon in a couple days.

[vorpalcoil]

Been developing my first real video game the last few days, and I've come to the conclusion that Coding Is Hard. Neat, though. I'm getting a sense of how it all loops together on a conceptual level, but the syntax of how to describe it precisely in the way the machine understands is so fiddly.

[vorpalcoil]

I talked about learning to code with a friend and they responded "why aren't you just using AI?".

Because I want to develop a skill and understand what I'm making…

[vorpalcoil]

Been developing my first real video game the last few days, and I've come to the conclusion that Coding Is Hard. Neat, though. I'm getting a sense of how it all loops together on a conceptual level, but the syntax of how to describe it precisely in the way the machine understands is so fiddly.

[vorpalcoil]

[This is the second half of the hidden backstory of 'Til Death. The first half can be found here.] A thousand years ago, the woman who came

The Ashen Empress is a character I've been toying with putting into more than one project for the last decade, she is close to my heart. Something within me just likes a cool, kind of evil immortal queen.