Thoughts on maintaining a game diary

I’ve been maintaining a video game diary since 2021.  I post it publicly on my pillowfort.  It is not the only media diary I maintain, I also review books (though I read very slowly).  Media diaries are very rewarding to maintain, I can wholeheartedly recommend it.  Sharing the diary publicly (to a small number of readers) is also rewarding, but in a more complicated way that I don’t necessarily recommend.  It challenges me to reconcile what I want from the diary, and what readers might get out of it.

For comparison, I’d like to discuss a couple game diaries maintained by public figures.  Gaming youtuber Razbuten has a diary on a second channel, titled “Games I played in [month]“.  Dark Souls youtuber Iron Pineapple has a series “Souls-like games you’ve never heard of” where he plays hundreds of games that could conceivably be described as “souls-like”.  Immediate caveat: both of these series are commercial products.  The youtubers make money off of them.  So I’m taking each of these series as a reflection of what viewers/readers like to see in a game diary.

The primary answer is reviews.  Recommendations.  Curation.  Discovery.

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I went gluten-free and it worked

Late last year, I was having some gastrointestinal issues, and someone suggested I should go gluten-free, as an experiment. I tried it for a few weeks, and it seemed to help.

So I started speaking to a dietician, and we did a bunch of tests to see what was going on. I kept a food diary. I eliminated a lot of different foods, and reintroduced them one by one. I determined that I have a sensitivity to a class of carbohydrates called FODMAPs.

I had heard of FODMAP sensitivity before my dietician told me about it. In a rare case where blogging has materially benefited me, I had blogged about the very same subject almost a decade ago. I had heard of (then recent) research that many people who believe they have gluten sensitivity are actually sensitive to FODMAPs. FODMAPs and gluten both occur in the same food, and so going gluten-free tends to help even if it wasn’t gluten that was the source of the problem.

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Link Roundup: June 2026

In last month’s journal club, we talked about ace characters on TV.

Why Video Games Cost So Much to Make | Jason Schreier (video, 17 min) – Schreier is a highly regarded games journalist, and I mean journalist rather than games critic.  He explains why video games are so expensive.  In short, it’s labor costs.  Take the salary of a programmer, multiply by the number of employees and number of years, and it’s a lot of money. Of course, any video game at any price is inherently an incredible deal because video games are great.

I disagree on Schreier about why programmers are so expensive.  The salary of a tech workers is more than enough to live and raise a family in the SF Bay Area.  Like, there are many workers who manage with less.  Even within the games industry, there are lower paid workers than the programmers.  One mustn’t imagine tech workers like we’re subsistence farmers!  Our skills are in demand, and so we are able to take a profit margin on our labor.  Which is what I would wish for all workers.

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Agnostic atheism and other hairsplitting terms

Atheism is associated with a handful of hairsplitting terms: agnosticism, agnostic atheism, ignosticism, apatheism, and so on. These terms describe some technicalities about one’s relationship to belief. For instance, “ignostic” refers to the viewpoint that god is too meaningless and ill-defined to believe one way or another. “Apatheist” describes someone who doesn’t care about belief in god.

“Hairsplitting” is a derogatory way to describe it, but I mean it fondly. I love hairsplitting. I’m involved in asexual communities, it comes with the territory. Asexuality is associated with a far greater number of hairsplitting terms, like graysexuality, demisexuality, all the romantic orientation terms (heteroromantic, homoromantic, biromantic, panromantic, aromantic).

And those are just the common ones! Asexuality has also been host to a tradition where people just coin terms left and right. This is a tradition I will vociferously defend, but do not personally partake. In terms of my personal identity, I follow a more reserved practice of adopting just a few common terms. If asked, I will tell you that I am gay gray-A, with the additional clarification that I do *not* describe myself as homoromantic except in specific contexts. See? I’m reserved.

Do you get what I’m saying? Within asexuality, there is an overton window that ranges from hairsplitting to very very hairsplitting. Within atheism, there is an overton window that ranges from hairsplitting to not very hairsplitting at all.

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Origami: Sferica

Sferica

Sferica, designed by Riccardo Colletto

I’m out travelling, but I brought some origami paper to fold.  I got this model from the 5th Geometric Origami Convention, and folded it on the train.  It’s essentially a variant of the herringbone tessellation, but slightly shifted so that it makes a shape like a sea urchin.