"We haven’t been to X in ages." "What was the name of that little Italian place we stopped at the day we went to Y?" "Yes, we went to Z on our...
Google Maps Timeline: The Argument-Killing Machine
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J.S. Morin
Altered Carbon: What Happens When Tech Makes Life Cheap?
Altered Carbon begins with a futuristic twist on the noir whodunnit. The victim commissions the detective’s help himself. Thanks to an alien...
Chess: Good Game, Bad Plot
Chess is having something of a minor resurgence these days (all things being relative, it’s probably still less popular than the average pay-to-win...
Mobius wimmelbilder – behind the scenes
Before I share the exciting project we spent 8 months working with an amazing wimmelbilder artist to complete, if you missed either my...
Wimmelbilder – Greatest German word ever?
Language is funny stuff. Often absurd. Especially English. I certainly make that point often enough in my writing by having my characters...
Yachts Are Evolving – Into Starships?
Early space travel was never going to be cheap… When I came up with the story of Hotel Caledonia (mission 7 of Black Ocean: Mercy for Hire), the...
The Puzzled Patron
I'm doing a little bit of a different take on the "fantasy board game" theme this week. This is a puzzle, but one whose artwork speaks directly to...
The Witcher – One of the few times you don’t need to read the book first
Back in 1990, Polish author published a short story collection whose title, in English, was The Witcher. In 2008, someone translated the first of a...
What Has Nine Lives and Is Stuck in a Loop?
A premise does not a story make. This one comes up time and again in Author Scrapheap. A lot of times I come up with a story idea that’s really just...
Incoming Transmission: Space Stations Are Hard Enough to Fix…
If only the antenna wasn’t the first thing broken. Incoming Transmission is a co-op puzzle game wherein a team tries to complete a set of repairs to...
Genetically engineered plants
Your Garden Center Doesn’t Carry THESE (yet…) Maybe you wanted to add a pop of color to a living space or just enjoy tending to living things and...
12 Monkeys: Time Travel Cranked to 11
The Army of the 12 Monkey was just the start Terry Gilliam’s 1995 movie, 12 Monkeys, starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, was a looping time travel...
Endless Blanket Fort
Who doesn't love a blanket fort? …maybe when it's like Labyrinth meets Coraline. So, I’ve always loved the notion of the "X wishes" story. You’ve...
Diablo: Point, Click, Loot, Repeat!
Though others came before it, 1997’s Diablo redefined and became the exemplar of the Action Role-Playing Game (ARPG) genre. ARPGs are...
SciFi contact lenses – the biggest monitor is the smallest
Early in Terminator 2 we are privy to a view from the terminator’s perspective. Cast in villainous shades of red, it shows an augmented reality...
Year 10 of My 5-10 Year Overnight Success Plan
Well, it happened. Ten years ago January, we released Firehurler. It was the first book in my first series, with the second well into its draft, at...
Legion may just be the weirdest corner of the X-Men Universe
In 2017, a show called Legion premiered on FX. It was set in the X-Men universe, though you’d hardly know it unless someone warned you in advance...
Who remembers A Pilot’s Pilot? …this was the prologue…
I realize that most, if not all, of you are here because you’re Black Ocean readers (for those who aren’t yet, it’s never too late!). So most of you...
Whispers of a Machine – An inventive puzzle game with a “killer” plot…PLUS cyber tools
One of my guilty pleasures is the murder mystery. One or more people are dead. We don’t know who killed them. Catch them before they either get away...
Inspector Gadget had nothing on the modern smart watch
Can we take a moment to appreciate the technological majesty of the smart watch? Dick Tracy was an American comic strip that debuted in newspapers...
District 9 – A dystopian future, or an uncomfortable past?
It never became a franchise, because it was never looking to become one. District 9 feels like a forgotten relic of an era that wasn’t even all that...
Last Angel has Fallen – Why I scrapped my take on an unanticipated apocalyptic failure
Armageddon has come, the demons won…but the last humans are looking for a rematch OK, I talk a lot about stuff I decided not to write because it was...
Check the Haul (a Black Ocean Christmas parody)
Holiday fun, reimagined by J.S. Morin for the Black Ocean fan group December 2021. Fa la la la la, la la la laFa la la la la, la la la la Check the...
Dice Throne – A cool adventure…or “Yahtzee with hitpoints”
Dice Throne is a fantasy combat game that, boiled down to its core, is “Yahtzee with hitpoints.” Each custom hero comes with their own playing board...