Lotan's Tomb - an experimental personal fork of Freedoom, for when I want an IWAD that does what I want. No committees, no inviolate traditions, just my unfiltered nonsense.This is a website where I keep various things I don't want to get buried and lost in a fleeting social media post. The subdomain "
Beware the Schmooze-Parasite - reflections on a specific recurring type of dysfunctional and exploitative relationship that introverted people who do interesting work often fall victim to. Based on a discussion in 2024 about old Misskey fork drama.
The three needful things - an attempt at the "is it needful/is it true/etc." sort of checklist of things to remember, based on things that had been running in my head for some time before their initial attempt to be articulated in 2018. Purely aspirational, of course.
On two dualities - a musing on categorizing the major disputes in our society today in how we see the world and what we think the world is. A rough of this was originally posted in 2013.
Meta on all human conflict - A reflection I had posted on fedi on the motivation behind some of the most toxic, uncharitable responses to opinions I was seeing on social media around the time the 2023 Israeli assault on Gaza started. Edited and sandwiched between two other posts on this topic I'd made on Dreamwidth a few years prior.
A spiritual cosmology of Light and Dark - a small thing about cosmic struggle of light and darkness, written in 2023 during my attempt to recreate what I valued about my former Christian faith, taking cues from both the Christians and the Zoroastrians and also one iconic image of a menorah with only one candle lit in a Nazi-occupied city. And Universal Paperclips.
Tadpoles - some kind of allegory about how my mind works, I guess. Originally posted in 2010.
[AO3 account here.]
Little Mouse and the Penny from Heaven - an amoral fairy tale. Originally posted in 2008 here.
Bee - a slice of life. Originally posted in 2008 here.
The Receipt - another slice of life. Originally posted for Rabbit Hole Day 2005 here.
Treatment #2 - in which no one knows what's going on but all are too embarrassed to admit it. A hit, an impossible love, a dream of escape, a horror, a horror. Written sometime around 2002-3.
Email Dungeon - generic FRPG rules designed for asynchronous online play.
Dice Warriors [PDF] - tactical fantasy wargaming using only a few six-siders and loose change. (DW3 is basically a reformatted 2 with minimal differences. DW1 can be found here.)
Random Name Generator - sorts out heavy/light syllables and is intentionally biased in favour of combinations considered to be pronounceable by English speakers. Canonical pronunciations are not given and are left to the reader. Does not check for inadvertently coming up with actual words, often inappropriate.
Random Name Generator "Bad Roguelike" - fancy S&S-esque titles in the style used in Azarg of the Twice-Exalted Oblivion.
Random Name Generator "6-20-5" - just random CVCVC outputs.
Random Passage Generator - creates a randomized text passage that looks vaguely like a free verse poem.
Dice Roller - for batch number randomization. There are better products out there nowadays.
Lotan's Tomb - an experimental personal fork of Freedoom, for when I want an IWAD that does what I want. No committees, no inviolate traditions, just my unfiltered nonsense.
Azarg of the Twice-Exalted Oblivion - a silly little roguelike. No loot, just pure, idiotically random combat. Originally written up in 2011 as my very first attempt at an original fully interactive outside of modding an existing engine, picked up again in 2020 to add a proper endgame, NPC behaviour and the body-switch mechanics, as well as additional visual effects and colorblind-friendly targeting cursors. All the graphics themselves are from the 2011 original.
Aesthetic Vanilla Gun Fixes - A DeHackEd patch that fixes some issues I have with Doom's guns. Almost purely aesthetic. Only tested with Freedoom but should be fine with id.
Random Doom level bash script - A cleaned-up version of a script I use for quick pickup games. Grabs a random wad from the specified folder(s), goes through it to look for map names in the data, then picks one of the mentioned maps at random. To be honest I'm posting this more so I can easily copy it to another computer if need be, than honestly thinking it would be of use to other people.
The following are meant for GZDoom.
Hideous Destructor - adds a few "realistic" elements to make things more challenging - and less unfairly balanced in the player's favour. Works with any Doom or Freedoom IWAD.
Rachel Amber voice pack - adds some sound clips from Life Is Strange: Before The Storm to complement the "Hey! Dickhead!" clip used in HD.
Minor Doom Tweaks - a personal mod that modernizes a few things, addresses a few longtime pet peeves of mine and makes weapons a bit more intense and responsive. The numbers say it should make things easier but the dynamics suggest otherwise.
Lizard Baby - an enhancement of the Keen replacement in Freedoom, giving the creature a bit of movement and agency instead of the creepy dead baby effect of a totally motionless sprite.
Superball - gives everyone a uniform rocket-like weapon and (optionally) slows down movement to give opponents a bit more time to think and shoot down other people's projectiles if need be. Primarily meant for deathmatch, though single or coop can make an interesting challenge. Works with any Doom IWAD that contains all necessary Doom 2 lumps.
Not LMS - a mutator that tries to emulate Last Man Standing-style scoring incentives without forcing anyone out of play. You lose a large number of frags on every death, by default far more than what you can hope to recover with kills. You are forced to respawn 1 second after death but no kills are counted for any purpose if either party had just spawned. Kills are counted independently for the purpose of exiting the map on hitting fraglimit.
Slow Bullet - a stand-alone finite-speed hitscan projectile for GZDoom, based on Hideous Destructor's bullet, for use in any non-HD-related project.
AO3 - mostly just to have a place to follow, bookmark and give non-anonymous kudos. And imagine Kate Marsh as the Doomguy.
Dreamwidth - updated rarely. Mostly for posting spur-of-the-moment insights and amusing links rather than daily life events. I've had this (and its Livejournal predecessor) for longer than some readers may have been alive, so not everything on here is offered with the intent that it reflect my current views.
If you want to email me, I have my