2025-12-18 02:36:00
When writing this, I have five links on the Bear discovery home page. Thank you to everyone who thinks some of my posts are worth an upvote. I’m truly grateful.
But to be honest, I also feel a bit embarrassed. I’m currently taking up about 25 percent of that page. That doesn’t really feel fair.
Maybe it’s just the Scandinavian jantelagen (Law of Jante) in me speaking, but I have a feeling others have thought about this too.
I’m sure most users agree that the discovery feed is one of the reasons Bear feels like such a lovely platform. There’s so much great content out there, and it really adds to the sense of community. My RSS reader is filled with blogs I’ve discovered this way, both through trending and most recent.
Herman has created something truly beautiful and useful. It’s a joy to publish your own content, and the discovery feeds are great for finding other people’s writing.
Still, maybe there’s room for one more section. Something that isn’t purely based on algorithms and recency. Something in between.
What about an Explore section? A place where trending and recent posts mingle in a nice little symbiosis. A place where a single blog can only appear once per page.
I would love such a feature. Then again, maybe this is just my inner overthinker chiming in again. Either way, I felt like I needed to get it out there.
Keep on blogging, no matter how “trendy” you are.
2025-12-18 02:34:04
Recently, I've been trying to locate my "writer voice," and what I find amusing, almost comical is how violently I tend to oscillate between Live your life! Start now! Pursue your goals! and, a few blogposts later, I am still depressed.
On Bear, these contradictions sit side by side, and in them I've recognized a fragile line: the difference between something you're experiencing and something you are. I find depression erodes that boundary. It blurs experience into identity, perpetuating a narrative of your life that feels totalizing but not necessarily true.
When I was struggling, I assumed it must've been because I was cynical, ungrateful, fundamentally flawed. My utter disengagement for living became evidence of a personal failure, an innate disposition rather than a passing state. We were fused together, depression and me. Where did it end, and where did I start?
I find it oddly consoling in the way my blog reads like a tug-of-war between motivational exigency and despair. These contradictions are not incoherence but proof of life. Proof that I exist apart from what I once collapsed into for years, what made me desperately ask myself: What is making me feel so different from everyone else?
The fact I can write, stubbornly, about goals, productivity, and forward motion at all is evidence (to myself) that a part of me hasn't yet surrendered. Depression is something I live with, but it's not my identity. My writing stands a quiet testimony to a person existing alongside an illness, resisting absorption and refusing erasure.
2025-12-18 01:04:00
This came out yesterday, but Larian's CEO has claimed that people there are at peace with the AI use they're being actively required to perform (which I doubt). The idea that an exec is requiring craftspeople to maximize AI use when it doesn't even improve a single thing about their workflow should make anyone second-guess their ambition to work there. However, a bigger reason to avoid applying is their terrible application process.
Larian requires a truly insane number of interviews - someone has reported 12 before they were turned down for their resume - and massive, unpaid writing tests, for which the writer is required to turn in something playable. Applying to Larian is like having a second job. It's a job where the manager is uncommunicative, withholding, and mean to you. I've heard multiple stories about people being ghosted entirely.
Apparently, they have stated to applicants that their writing style cannot be taught. Anyone who's been a narrative manager in games before, like me, knows that this is preposterous.
I have never applied to Larian because I've been hearing these stories for years. I would not willingly apply to work there unless I saw some public announcement from the team that the hiring experience had changed and that they regretted the old one. I do think that Larian should consider these process improvements high-priority - it's been destroying their reputation among the best of the best for years, to the point where many skilled writers and narrative designers I know would never apply there. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely to change.
I've completed both paid and unpaid writing tests. If you're going to assign an unpaid writing assignment, it's good practice to keep the assignment short enough that a busy person - an adult with kids or other major after-work and weekend responsibilities - could fit it in around their life without negative impact to the people who rely on them. This means limiting it to a several-hour task (including revision time). I believe my unpaid editorial test for Riot took around three hours. Much longer unpaid tests - the kind of thing that takes several days, or even a week - are undeniably extremely exploitative.
I've applied to only a couple places which paid me for my work on writing tests. I was paid by Brace Yourself Games, by whom I was eventually hired to write the early access content for Industries of Titan. Paying for a writing test allows the studio to use the material applicants write in the game itself, if they want. Pursuing this strategy also allows them to treat the person like a contractor, send out an NDA, and actually test the writer's ability to learn and use a project's real IP.
It's as good for them as it is for me, because it reduces the negative impact of long hiring processes on the studio by allowing them to harvest useful material from failed applications. (This isn't possible for every type of game, but you can often find at least one "harvestable" asset type to assign in a test somewhere.)
Unfortunately, paying for tests also requires a studio to be judicious about how many tests they assign per open role. Rather than using it as a giant filter sent out to many, many people, they'd need to budget for it and limit the number of payouts they're doing. So it requires a studio to be good at assessing resumes, good at seeking references, and good at interviewing. A lot of studios are very, very bad at interviewing.
The reason more people don't write about this is because there are so few writing jobs out there generally. It is risky to criticize the hiring department of a studio that does the exact kind of writing many games writers dream of doing - massive, story-led projects full of strong personalities and branching dialogue. It is kind of crazy for me to be posting this at all now that I don't have a job! But it's worth talking about. I've had a couple encounters with other game devs who have been surprised to hear me say things like "Oh my god, no, I would never apply to Larian as long as they still do that writing test." For some reason, the story just hasn't penetrated the industry very far beyond the writing and narrative design professions.
But it's penetrated the narrative side of the industry completely. Almost everyone I know who works in this space has heard these stories from multiple friends and acquaintances. It's the worst of the worst as application experiences go, and everyone knows it.
2025-12-17 17:33:00
I was upgrading a project to Spring Boot 4. Multiple modules and libraries. Java, Gradle, AWS, CI, Docker... The kind of change that usually demands long-lived branches, careful sequencing, and a lot of trial and error.
What surprised me wasn't the technical complexity. It was how much the shape of the work changed once the cost of being wrong went to zero.
This is what my tree looked like:
➜ java-upgrade git:(5561fa3) ✗ jj
@ nruuvkns arnau@local 2025-12-12 20:31:20 spring4 27d4b705
├─╮ upgrade to spring boot 4.0
│ ○ rzoyrzpv arnau@local 2025-12-12 20:30:29 jackson3 d76dcecc
│ │ upgrade from jackson2 to jackson3
○ │ yyxuxnmk arnau@local 2025-12-12 20:31:17 aws-cloud git_head() 5561fa39
├─╯ upgrade aws cloud 4
○ ttusytzr arnau@local 2025-12-12 20:30:29 spring35 5a817998
│ upgrade to spring boot 3.5
○ uolmolxo arnau@local 2025-12-12 20:30:29 java-25 26dda0de
├─┬─╮ upgrade to java sdk 25
│ │ ○ yvklzspu arnau@local 2025-12-12 20:29:47 aws-sdk-2 e2045bf6
│ │ │ upgrade to java aws sdk 2
│ ○ │ mkwpqylt arnau@local 2025-12-12 20:30:18 refactor-cache 36105341
│ ├─╯ simplifies cache by removing external dependencies
○ │ qxmnvtxp arnau@local 2025-12-12 20:29:56 docker-image 49a19a38
├─╯ ci uses in-house image and new action gradle tasks
○ kpqwwnkk arnau@local 2025-12-12 20:29:42 gradle bf2b0dad
│ upgrade gradle 8 to gradle 9
◆ zzzzzzzz root() 00000000
Nothing was planned in advance.
Every change in that log became a pull request. One stacked on top of another. My team reviewed the smallest possible diff as best as Github allowed it.
There's a video of Brian Anderson reading a code review where he talks about being afraid of feedback. About needing time to process it. Brian is phenomenal. I respect his honesty because that fear never really goes away. We know we aren't the code we write. Even when you know you aren’t your code, mistakes still feel expensive.
I don't need a clean history to make progress. I don't need to get it right before sharing. I don't even need it to work. I can try something, show it to my team, and throw it away without shame. I reverted commits. I shared wip ideas. I could say "this might be stupid" and still push it.
Commands like duplicate, squash, and restore aren't just technical operations. They're psychological tools because they remove the cost of being wrong.
Understanding how your teammate thinks is often more valuable than the code they wrote. Conflicts aren't failures. They're conversations.
Many tools and methodologies encourage you to decide on a solution before you understand the problem. This way of working does the opposite. It rewards motion: thinking, prototyping, writing, breaking things, fixing them. Fearless Sledgehammer Programming. It's a creative process. Friction slows progress. I need movement.
I don't want to teach jj. I want to share what it taught me.
When experimentation is cheap, you stop optimizing for correctness up front and start optimizing for feedback. And once the cost of being wrong drops low enough, fear quietly gets out of the way.
2025-12-17 04:57:50
"You got a third? It's not even worth the paper it's printed on!"
My ex didn't hold back when it came to telling me how much I'd messed up with my degree, in the UK, a third is essentially the worst passing grade you can get, and I managed it.
I'm not intending to make excuses, it was my own fault but the sad part about it is that she was absolutely right. I studied Graphic Design and in the 17 years since, I've never once been asked about my degree or whether I even had one.
Now, I'm sure some of you will read that and say well, why bother studying Graphic Design at University if nobody will care if I get a degree? Here's the thing, if you're studying Graphic Design (or most creative subjects I believe), you're not doing it to gain the degree.
Yes, you heard me... You're not doing it for the degree. You're doing it for the ability to experiment, to build a network and to utilise the knowledge of your tutors.
They were all things that I did not do and it's the only thing I regret about my time at University.
If I want to start using different media or attempting new techniques or even if I want to collaborate with anyone, it's so much more difficult now than it would have been at University.
But not only that, but had I done those things, my grades would have immediately been better anyway... Who'd have thought that eh?
So no, this isn't me telling you not to go to University, it's me telling you that if you decide to go, make sure you make the most of the experience rather than focusing on the grades, because the grades don't matter... The experience you gain, connections you make and understanding of different techniques and practices? That will be invaluable.
2025-12-17 03:04:00
A list of things I might dump in 2026:
What is on your list?