Alexei Pepers

Never mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took in university:
- Contemporary Meta-Ethics
- Social Psychology
- Special Topics in CPSC: Retrogames
- Cool Science (science coms, taught by a famous Dutch popular scientist)
- Natural Disasters & Earth Phenomena (doubling down on this one!)

Agaricus bisporus - Wikipedia

Fun fact: the Agaricus bisporus is *the* domesticated mushroom.

As a baby mushroom you know it as the cheap white button mushroom, as a kid mushroom it's called a cremini, as an adult it's called a portabella.

Same mushroom.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agaricu...

I worked with the irrepressible @jonremedios.bsky.social @tylermakesgames.bsky.social @rainysector.bsky.social @bravemule.bsky.social to write a paper on why permadeath (and other forms of loss in games) appeals, and what we lose when we try to paper over it with metaprogression. Check it out!

Being tokupilled means going from "wow these effects are pretty corny" to "this is literally the coolest fucking thing I've ever seen in my life".

If you ever can swing a flight to Vancouver I will absolutely make you as much tuna as you can eat 😆

Bonus on the side that I ate too quickly to get nice photos - deep fried enoki fritters. I absolutely loved these, super crispy edges that fan out in the oil yet the stalk bundle stays pleasantly chewy. With vegan mayo and kimchi juice for a tangy dipping sauce. Wok frying kicks ass.

A single thinly sliced piece of tuna tataki on rice, topped with sesame seeds and chili. There is a thin even layer of cooked brown flesh around the blush inner tuna that is still raw.

A rectangular plate overflowing with thinly sliced pieces of tuna tataki

A good problem to have: too much tuna tataki for it to plate nicely. Got a blowtorch at Xmas, now I’m unstoppable. Best hack was using Korean yuzu honey tea jelly as the basis of the drizzle, you get the yuzu hit of ponzu but with all these extra flavours (and don’t need to go out and buy ponzu lol)

I was so glad to see Pirates on the final list - I agonized over leaving it out of mine since it’s one of my fav games I go back to and representative of a type of game design I adore (you described so well in your write up on it!)… but my career hasn’t given me the chance to do much like it 🥲

I showed this to @procgenkawa.bsky.social and they accused me of starting our new year with violence

Up past 2 AM looking through old family albums to see the hidden page with the photo of naked Russian-Canadian folk-Protestant protestors, with a diversion of finding my great-great grandmother’s baby head being used as an example in a phrenology journal. Filled with post-Xmas pre-new years spirit 😆

Thematic expression in game design, or: Why Dune (1992) rules Games like Dune (1992) and Pirates (1987) are hardly ever made any more. What sets them apart?

New blog post (and email newsletter): azhdarchid.com/designing-fo...

Woooah that’s so cute!!

posted about my Apple ID woes, please share widely?

hey.paris/posts/appleid/

I really enjoy The Design of Everyday Things but honestly I end up so fascinated by the window into a quite different world than the one I grew up in, technology wise, that my main takeaway is always stuff like “wow professional life before cell phones sure was extremely different.” 😅

Three crispy Japanese style cutlets resting on a wire rack

A slice of tonkatsu

Katsudon in a big black bowl, with green onion and spicy sesame seeds sprinkled on top.

After multiple days of being responsible and using up leftovers, I just spent two hours making dashi, tonkatsu, and finally katsudon. My inability to do anything in moderation has never tasted so good.

Steal, sneak and persuade your way through the simulated city of Fortuna.

🏛 Watch the new gameplay trailer and sign up for our Alpha playtest: store.steampowered.com/app/2946850/...

Advent of Code Day 1 beginning with “the elves have discovered project management,” as the in-universe explanation for it being 12 days this year instead of 25, is unbelievably good.

I was handling audio so luckily the most damage I could do was accidentally having it playing music on shuffle, so that the ambient spooky wind noises were followed by Java Jive by the Inkspots, which I didn’t notice until the director burst into my booth ready to throttle me.

My high school Macbeth had a dramatic sword break, via strong magnets holding the blade to the hilt. One night the actors messed up the choreography and instead of back of stage, the dull but very heavy sword flew into an audience member’s face. I’m realizing now how normal that sort of thing is 😅

Credits for Brent Porter (3D art lead) and Catherine Menabde (2D art lead) are shown here. There's a lengthy description of what they did, with a pastiche of various Demonschool characters underneath, messing around with a computer.

We did something different with the credits for Demonschool. We used this format: name, title, lengthy description of what they did. Often you see credits in games where you don't know what the credited developer was actually responsible for. We wanted to give people proper, actual credit.

do yourself a favor and dont even hate-watch that shit this year, man. go see a movie. edgar wright's new thing is in theatres. demonschool is out in 2 days, birdcage is out tomorrow. play something from your backlog. tron 2.0 is $10 on gog. catch up on some tv. do groceries. whatever.

yep it's a Malort advent calendar alright

"Malort advent calendar" is already such an unhinged concept but every little window just having Malort in it really pushes it over the edge into something transcendently funny

My family lives on an acreage just outside Bragg Creek and has to maintain their own septic and well. The yearly tradition is using a metal detector to find the well head under the packed snow and building a fire over it, until it’s melted enough we can pop it open and fix whatever has frozen, lol

Just want you to know that when I asked Geoff why he gave the silent treatment to an open letter written by his own "future of games" program (& co-signed by 3000+ industry peers), he replied:

"Because that's my show and nobody gets to tell me how I should use my platform". 💀💀💀

Do other folks have nightmares about the shitty parts of game dev, even long after the fact? Layoffs, project cancellations, terrible leadership. They suck enough the first time but my brain just loves to relive them instead of sleeping 🥲

A bonus episode on Nightfall in Middle Earth and the wider world of The Tolkien Ensemble and such *would* be very fun.

I am so excited to spend my commute listening to coverage of Fëanor’s bullshit. As Kawa pointed out, our emergency go-bag currently contains my copy of The Hobbit, but not my passport. So this is great news for me specifically.

I referenced that poem in our wedding vows so my point very much did stand in the longer term 😂❤️

A while after @procgenkawa.bsky.social asked me out they showed me a poem they’d written about math, and I was like well damn, you could’ve just led with this and it would be a done deal. Cool of you to do the extra wooing but this could have been a one step process!