Staining The Timbre

The Silo Series , by which it is referred to in totality, is a popular sci-fi book partly because it's a quality work of art, but also because of the mythology surrounding its publication. Originally only the first book (simply titled Wool ) was meant to stand alone. Hugh Howey self-published the story, having previously decided to do so because of the increased artistic freedom, and let it ride. Driven by the  story's popularity he wrote more entries, starting with Wool: Proper Gauge , which expands upon the grim events of Wool and follows a new set of characters met only briefly in the previous foray. In less than two months he had written the next three entries, Casting Off, The Unraveling, and The Stranded respectively, and completed the core story of the Silo series. This isn't even covering the alleged seven-figure publishing rights payday Howey turned down to maintain online publishing rights while the series was sent to print by Simon & Schuster. He ha

I first encountered farming simulators at the tender age of seven. I was staying the night at a friend's house and he let me play Harvest Moon on his Gameboy. At the time it seemed like a boring concept (even as an adult the idea of simulating farm work sounds objectively lame) but I found myself enjoying the game far more than I expected. After we went to sleep I secretly pulled out the Gameboy and kept playing for hours under the cover of darkness. For a long time Harvest Moon was basically the only option you had if you wanted to virtually farm. Eventually you had cash grab imitators like Farmville pop up with the advent of social networking, but they never scratched the same itch. They had stripped the gameplay to its bones and forced you to wait an arbitrary amount of time just to progress, leaving them as poor facsimiles of a fondly remembered childhood. I was thus blindsided in 2016 when Steam recommended to me Stardew Valley. Harvest Moon hadn't had a publicly-no

For a long, long time my favorite book was Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. This was in part because it's objectively a hugely influential novel, and also because I made the decision at a very young age. When you're 14 and you want to sound smart in front of your friends, you pick the most "academic" book you've read and double down on it. That's just how it goes. Luckily reading, unlike the rest of my adolescence, wasn't just a phase. Until my mid-20s I would devour pages and pages in a single sitting, enjoying my time but having convinced myself that, no matter how good a book was, it would never be my favorite book because that slot was already spoken for and, as we all know, favorites are permanent. It was last year when my mother, of all people, told me about Children of Time . She was in the midst of listening to it on audiobook and wasn't having a great time, which was unsurprising given that she's not big into highbrow scifi.