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You’d be forgiven for thinking Dead or Alive was merely copying Sega’s legendary Virtua Fighter 2 if you glanced between …

The riot of colour that’s unleashed if I leave this Saturn exclusive remake of Falcom’s self-described “poetic” RPG on its …

A new Mega Drive game—and it is a Mega Drive game, not a generic “nostalgic ’90s retro revival”—here? Now? And …

Sonic Team’s effortlessly stylish mouse-wrangling Dreamcast  game crams a lot of different ways to play onto its bright orange GD-ROM. …

I’m not sure how I got here but I know what I, Chase Lowry, a talented actor currently in one …

Mysterium was in Atlanta this year. I didn't attend but I followed (some of) the streams. You can catch up on their Twitch channel; videos will be moved to Youtube once they're edited. This was not, sadly, a news-heavy year. This is because ...

Here's a story I heard last night about 3D printing. (I'm not in the 3D-printing scene. I know people who are, though. And it's an interesting story, what the hell. If I can blog about dirty sea shanties, I can blog about the additive manufacturing ...

We talk about story characters who are "genre-aware" or "genre-savvy". Although it's more like trope-savvy, right? The horror movie protagonist who gets off the property rather than smooching someone in a dark cellar. The manor-house murderer ...

Recent puzzle fun. Cipher Zero Coupling Monument Valley 3 (See also Occlude from a couple of weeks ago.) Cipher Zero by Zapdot -- game site A Witness-like which starts out in nonogram (paint-by-number) territory and then gets more complicated. ...

In 2009, I kicked off my senior year in college with a class that ultimately changed the way I thought about my degree—and my future.

I'm going to the World Science Fiction Convention in Seattle! And speaking! It's the first Worldcon I've attended since 2009 (Montreal). After the Hadean Lands kickstarter, I figured I should spend my travel budget on game dev conferences rather ...

It’s been a few months now, but Dice’n Goblins is out, on multiple platforms. You can buy it now on Steam or Fanatical. This was probably the hardest project I’ve ever done. It required thousands of hours of work and lived in my brain, for all the hours I was not working. Was it worth it It’s been 3 months and it generated a little bit of money. Enough to pay back production costs and pay for some expenses.

This past weekend, I decided to take a trip down memory lane and take a look at the evolution of this blog’s design over the years (with a little help from the Wayback Machine). While I’ve really enjoyed the challenge of making an obsessively backwards compatible blog these last few years, the challenge (and limitations associated with it) has sort of lost its luster; so I figure it was time try something new… and old.

So much for writing all about my teaching journey, huh?

My thoughts and first impressions of the Zen Browser!

My methodology and reasoning for making a blocklist to finally clean up unwanted content from search engines!

I talk about my experience and impressions of getting a Vita in 2025. Spoilers: I really like it!

A personal list of great free software that I use in my daily life

It’s been a very long time since I’ve posted anything here–don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about you all; it just turns out that the first year as a teacher is extremely time-consuming.

So I finished FF8 after 22 years It’s a long time to finish a game. I bought this game from a friend as a kid when I was around 12 in 2002. It was my first story-rich JRPG (I think the other JRPG I played was Pokemon at the time). I fell in love at the time. FF8 was pulling me in with a story and a world I could never have imagined.

[This piece is co-authored with Vsevolod Livinskii.] Formal verification isn’t some sort of magic pixie dust that we sprinkle over a computer system to make it better. Real formal verification involves a lot of the same kind of difficult, nasty, grungy engineering work that any other systems-level job involves. Furthermore, the verification tools themselves are […]

Dice’n Goblins is still advancing steadily. This month, I’ve received the help of my partner Seto, and a bunch of stuff is moving at a greater pace. On my side, I finished designing, scripting, and filling the levels 4, 5 and 6. The scenario for this part have been written as well. The game have a main story, but each set of level have their own storyline. This particular set focus on your companion Skelly, and his old friends.

As I prepare to take my terrifying leap into hackademia, I’ve been freelancing a lot more lately—both as a way to freshen up some of my more rusty skills (Directing leaves little room for slinging code or technical writing), and as a way to offset some of the lost income (teachers are criminally underpaid in this country, so please hire me).

Time for another devlog, it has been a while. About Steam Page The big news for this month is that the Steam Page was up. It took me a lot of time, because I would overthink stuff a lot, and the requirements are numerous. The days following the opening were spent mostly on social media, telling people to wishlist it. Quite surprisingly, a Japanese website, Gamespark picked my game from the constant stream of Games, and I got a lot of wishlists from it.

This tooks a while, but I finally can present you my game! It will be released on Steam. I would be really thankfull if you wishlist it!

Compilers can be improved over time, but this is a slow process. “Proebsting’s Law” is an old joke which suggested that advances in compiler optimization will double the speed of a computation every 18 years — but if anything this is optimistic. Slow compiler evolution is never a good thing, but this is particularly problematic […]

In its original form, a peephole optimization applied to a collection of instructions located close together in a program. For example, in a register transfer language we might find this sequence of instructions: r0 = xor r8, -1 r1 = xor r9, -1 r0 = and r0, r1 Here, assuming the two’s complement representation, -1 […]

[This piece is co-authored by Ryan Berger and Stefan Mada (both Utah CS undergrads), by Nader Boushehri, and by John Regehr.] An optimizing compiler traditionally has three main parts: a frontend that translates a source language into an intermediate representation (IR), a “middle end” that rewrites IR into better IR, and then a backend that […]

[This piece is coauthored by Yuyou Fan and John Regehr] Mutation-based fuzzing is based on the idea that new, bug-triggering inputs can often be created by randomly modifying existing, non-bug-triggering inputs. For example, if we wanted to find bugs in a PDF reader, we could grab a bunch of PDF files off the web, mutate […]