Finally finished rolling the last of the stones for this project. I actually started this while I was sick with food poisoning and then Covid this summer. The burning of the lines on the board was very meditative while I couldn't think straight. Once I had it together I coated it in beeswax, cut a little leather strap clasp from an old belt, and rolled stones from polymer clay. I find that the size of these stones and the grid are a bit awkward to play with, small to pick up with clumsy fingers. Now I understand why standard boards have grids and pieces of a certain size, but I'm still very proud of this board as a thing I made for myself.

#punkcrafts

As I age I want to grow into a kind of great Deku Tree or Grandmother Willow, figure that the young-uns can come to in their times of distress and I will give them comfort, then wisdom, and then a knife before sending them back out into the world to cause trouble for dragons and kings alike.

biblically accurate angel but make it cute vibes for halloween

it's not #ScreenshotSaturday but I'm just really glad to have finally figured out how to get the terrain biomes blending smoothly over long distances in #ProjectWeirdLittleGuy without weird shader artefacts in between. And yes I am just encoding 12 different custom values into the vertex data which limits the potential number of biomes, that's FINE

Finally got around to painting Ursula today. Having female models and an older woman as a hero model of the Imperial Guard was honestly the thing that made me feel actually keen to restart my Guard army after immigrating and leaving all my old models back in Australia. #wh40k

Since finding out I'm being laid off last week, so many wonderful people have reached out to me with offers of support. Often people ask "Let me know if there's anything I can do to help." Because I know there are other folks in similar situations getting similar offers for support but feeling too overwhelmed to actually take anyone up on those offers, I made a #zine . It's called:

**Things You Can Do To Help Your Depressed ADHD / Autistic Friend While She Looks For Work **

It's 8 a5 pages of detailed practical suggestions on ways you can support someone going through a rough time, especially if they struggle with neurodivergence or depression. I've written it for my friends as a guide for helping me specifically but I think most of the advice is broad enough that it can help a lot of folks in a lot of situations.

You can grab the pdf here: https://acegiak.net/etc/Things%20You%20Can%20Do%20For%20Your%20Depressed%20ADHD%20-%20Autistic%20Friend%20While%20She%20Looks%20For%20Work.pdf or I've put it up for $0 on itch.io so that you can find it more easily later if you misplace it and want to find it again: https://acegiak.itch.io/things-you-can-do-for-your-depressed-adhd-autistic-friend-while-she-looks-for-wo

So I'm one of the casualties of last week's Stockholm Gamedev Bloodbath, losing my position at Avalanche. I've had an amazing time there but it's time to work out what happens next.

If your team or a team you know needs "an unstoppable force of creation", "the best team leader I've had", or someone who is "inventive, patient, expressed herself with clarity, & is deft at design"* then I'm available for creative leadership, game design, narrative, and good-trouble-making roles. Reach out here, on linkedin, @acegiak.bsky.social on bluesky, or email at acegiak@gmail.com.

*quotes from, in order, a friend, a member of my team, and a colleague

New personal best: 100kg deadlift x 2

You know what's actually a really cool linguistic technology/innovation I've seen emerge in my lifetime and solve an actual problem I struggled with?

The rise of the word "Verdance".

I remember being in school and being a fantasy nerd trying to write, GM, design games and always struggling to find a word for the elemental force of plants, growth, green things, and then at some point I encountered the word Verdance and I was like "of course! That's perfect and seems so obvious in retrospect!"

And you can see it's rise in the Ngrams. I think it might have been discussing Sunless Skies things with the lovely folks at Failbetter where I first encountered it in this kind of form but there's clearly some jumps after 2010 and then 2016 and I'm curious what caused those.