Rediscovery While Staying Warm in the Cold
Sakina's Kiss, Death Becomes Her, and Expedition 33
February flurries in with the promise of severely longer cold spells and slightly longer days. An accordion player in my subway car plays a jaunty, upbeat tune as we cross the East River in the late morning. I watch the sun reflect off glimmering water out the window, feeling like the protagonist in the exposition of a mildly comedic French drama.
It is a battle against Punxsutawney Phil and terrible current events not to go numb. Creating in this time is akin to breaking out of a tightly packed blanket of snow. I am cold.
Despite (and perhaps to spite) all that, writing feels more important than ever. Creating things with and for other real, breathing human beings feels that much more necessary. And, also: fun. A buoyant, uplifting current that keeps me warm.
I’ve been making slow and steady headway on a variety of creative goals while planning for an upcoming move. Here’s the latest:
Vision setting
I hosted a casual vision board making event for my friends where we chatted over flaky baklava and cups of strong chai about what we're looking forward to this year. It was a very cozy gathering where I got to learn more about the interests of my friends and we all went around sharing crazy car stories. For my part, I finally got around to finishing my Personal Bingo Card, which includes things like “clean up Gdrive storage” and “introduce myself to 10 new people.” I also updated my Creative Bingo Card a bit. (You'll notice some squares are slightly different, and gone are any Pro assets now that my free trial has ended).
Rediscovering old passions
The 2026 Global Game Jam – a worldwide, 48-hour event that’s essentially a hackathon for making games – was the last weekend of January. After almost 10 years, I tried my hand at game dev again (and narrative design, this time) and experienced what it’s like to collaborate with a small team of artists, programmers, and another writer to create a mini platformer around the theme “masks.” Our game can be found here!
Over those 2 days I tried my hand at Godot, an open source game engine that’s especially good for 2D games, and built out a dialogue manager that presented text that I wrote. I learned about building scenes, handling collisions, and incorporating assets. After over 5 years of not using Git, I did, and I fought in the trenches of Godot’s terrible integration for merging text scene files.
It was scrappy, fun, and most notably – intuitive. My years working as a senior engineer and doing product management naturally funneled into this game jam in a way that felt surprisingly seamless. I remember doing hackathons in college and feeling completely out of my depth. Trying out new software or coordinating a team felt intimidating and incredibly confusing not so long ago.
But now, trying out Godot for the first time and keeping a group of 9 people aligned and moving felt like hard-earned smooth sailing. Here I had undeniable evidence of my growth as an engineer and collaborator over the years, and it honestly felt awesome. It’s nice to be reminded now and then of how far you’ve come. It reminds you that the skills you learn over the years, through various jobs and projects, are carried with you to the next opportunity. You are the one learning, improving, growing. And you take that with you wherever you go.
Leveling up the lexicon
I’ve been wanting to refresh my vocabulary, which I’ve noticed has started to shrink as I spend less time reading and more time scrolling. As part of this goal, I installed an app simply called Vocabulary, which lets me add a widget to my phone’s home screen that updates with a new word and its definition every few hours. I’m hoping that through osmosis I will absorb these words back into my repertoire. They’re… mostly relevant. I did see “poppycock” on there recently, which I decidedly refuse to absorb because that would be poppycock.
TTRPG shenanigans
I’ve been running a home game and playtesting custom mechanics for a few friends in a setting I created. It’s a role-playing focused, Ghibli-esque magical world slowly being overrun by [REDACTED], and it started as a way for me to channel disillusionment into creativity. We just had our third session, a delightful Thursday at high school where absolutely nothing bad happened and everything was totally completely fine. I’ve been noting how mechanics are coming into play and what can be improved in the hopes of eventually publishing it. More details on this to come!
What I’m…
Now for a section I’m doing in an attempt to share coherent, fully-articulated opinions about media I consume instead of the standard “AAHH love” or “yikes nope” I have written down in a Google spreadsheet. Fluently expressing ideas is a skill I had taken for granted back in the era of pre-SFV, but these days finding the right words for the right sentence sometimes feels like wading through sand. My hope is to build it back up this way.
What I’m reading: Sakina’s Kiss
After learning about it from meghna rao’s review, I put a hold on Sakina’s Kiss by Vivek Shanbhag on Libby. The audiobook arrived before the ebook, so over the course of a few days I listened to this English translation (by Srinath Perur) of the Kannada original. I’ve been wanting to read more Kannada literature since reading Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp last fall - a collection of short fiction stories about the lives of Muslim women in Karnataka, and the International Booker Prize winner of 2025.
I went in completely blind to Sakina’s Kiss and was astounded by the progression of a seemingly innocuous fiction story into the unsettling, prescient study of reactive conservatism it really is. The protagonist, Venkat, starts off as a sympathetic character – a devoted husband, a doting father, a generally average man with a love for reading and reminiscing. As he reminisces, though, the truth of his character trickles through, in both subtle and shocking revelations of his past. His insidious self-deception, his resentment towards progress, his longing for a simpler time when his authority was unquestioned – this, too, is Venkat. The craft with which Shanbhag slowly illuminates Venkat’s character is extraordinary.
If I had one gripe about this, it was that the audiobook narrator, Sunil Malhotra, was pretty liberal with the use of stereotypical accents. The more rural a character, the more nasal and strong the accent, and at times this felt so unnecessary I found myself jolted out of immersion. Reading the book might be the better option here.
What I’m playing: Expedition 33
I recently finished playing Expedition 33 and have been wallowing in the post-game void that accompanies the end of an incredibly well-told story. I didn’t think I was much for turn-based JRPGs, but I guess I am when they’re by Sandfall Interactive. The dialogue felt so real and relatable for a story about a Paintress in a magical world who disappears people older than an age that steadily ticks down to zero. The gradual expansion of the world and stakes as each act progressed was masterfully done. Each character’s story arc was so gorgeously thought out, and also, you can fight a mime to bopping music while dressed as a little Frenchman with a baguette.
I truly cannot praise this game enough, other than to say I highly recommend you go out and play it. And that everyone deserves their own Esquie.
What I’m watching: Death Becomes Her
My friend and I recently watched Death Becomes Her for Broadway Week, and it was a true campy delight. I love that the musical revised the movie’s ending to be a bit more balanced: (spoilers) Helen Sharp and Madeline Ashton commit to one another as each other’s “person” in a far more loving manner that respects the character development they have throughout the show, and Ernest Menville gets his happy ending without appearing to the audience as morally superior, which also feels more fitting.
Jennifer Simard was phenomenal – I especially loved “Madeline” and every other hilarious moment where she alternated between booming belts and unhinged singsong. Betsy Wolfe, Christopher Sieber, Michelle Williams (whom I was not at all expecting), and Taurean Everett all had incredible stage presence and captivating voices. 10/10.
Fin
If you have any show or book recs, or thoughts on reconnecting with old passions or reaffirming your skills – drop them in the comments and I’ll be sure to take a look! Thanks for reading.