Ben Chandler
@threeohfour.bsky.social
I make games! Known for Old Skies, Expelled!, Nighthawks, Unavowed, Technobabylon, Blackwell Epiphany, Shardlight, Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator and more. :)
Hey all, need your help! John’s been made redundant at the game studio he’s been working at for the last 4 years. He’s not on here but maybe y’all can help cheer him up by checking out some of his game jams. The latest one is ADEPTH! Shares appreciated! Spooky games ahead! 👻 guddies.itch.io/a-depth
Adepth by Guddies
Escape a sinking submarine, fear what lurks in the deep.
guddies.itch.io
All these impossibly aesthetic EDC videos with carabiners and flashlights and tactical pens and nobody carrying a damn hanky, c’mon.
There are many things to like about the Hitman games, but my favourite is that a guard will see you take out three of his comrades by throwing cans of expired spaghetti sauce at their heads and call you in as an ‘active shooter’.
I get asked about the night sky out where I live, well, I took this photo of the Milky Way on my phone after dinner. :)
I have been thinking about Umberto Eco’s description of Dan Brown for three days.
Today I grumpily said aloud “Fine, I’ll do it the easy way!” when my knowingly chosen hard way proved to be hard. At least I laughed at myself afterwards.
Never thought I'd die fighting side by side with Tolkien.
Ranged Touch@rangedtouch.bsky.social · 2w agothis is so important it needed its own clip actually
Obviously Nick Johnston is a superbly accomplished guitarist, but I was still curious to see how the new Mastodon album would feel. Delighted to say that I feel like he fits in perfectly.
One of my all-time favorite rules, from Pea Ridge (1980). The designer's great-great-grandfather fought in the battle, and if his unit takes damage you roll a die to see if he survives. If he dies, the designer is never born, and the game doesn't exist, and so automatically ends in a draw.
I read There Are Doors by Gene Wolfe recently and if you want to know how strange it was, I kept thinking “This feels like playing a text adventure, tonally” a lot of the time. It would be much harder to map out, though.
2:30am, raining. Can’t sleep, so I get up and make toast with plum jam, a miracle of food preservation. I watch a video about axolotls via the miracle of the internet. And I think: Artaxerxes, Khufu, Kangxi, would have given whole cities for these small luxuries I have.
I only say one Simpsons line ever, and it’s when I recruit a Minotaur in Might & Magic 8, and I say “Don’t have a cow-man”, this sounds like a bit but I swear it’s the truth.
I like being alive BUT I like being asleep which feels counterintuitive.
I advocate adopting meteorology’s ’feels like’ system for page counts of books. For example - A Sorceress Comes to Call - 400 pages long, feels like 200 pages. Or - The Turn of the Screw - 120 pages long, feels like 320 pages. Time to mark page counts as qualitative values!
I’m 1/3 of the way into Gene Wolfe’s ‘There Are Doors’ and I can’t tell whether it’s the book itself, or the fact that I’m reading it in bed with a fever, but I might have finally found the Wolfe book that’s too hard for me to follow.
Reading A Trade of Blood with lunch and coffee and it’s so peculiar to have a novel series that I’m really into, and can read when they’re brand new again. Haven’t had this since Discworld. I think I doubted I’d ever get that again.
The weirdest trend is how many productivity video essays are by people who mainly seem to produce nothing but productivity video essays.
I started a non-fiction book about Joan of Arc and it’s engaging but it also says she was a peasant who after hearing from angels for five years “cut her hair short, put on armour, and went off to war” but c’mon you HAVE to explain where she got the armour from, she’s a peasant!
Judith x Holofernes. I did this around the pandemic. Old news for the other sites, but not here. I'm very proud of it.
