all blog posts

I was walking down the street to get some takeout tonight, and out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a huge stuffed animal sitting in the front window of a toystore.

And it reminded me of an old friend.

Until I looked again more closely.

While cohost’s users were mourning the loss of the website online, Natalie (and Liz and Zandra) organized a Seattle Cohost Wake that happened last week. Additional wakes popped up in Boston, Philly, and a few other cities. Today, I attended the San Francisco Bay Area Wake, cohost-(heh)-ed by Damien, Nicky Flowers, and Diane in Oakland.

We met, N95+ masks on, by Lake Merritt under the shade of a giant tree and sat in fold up chairs, on blankets, and generally about the grass. I brought my fish picnic blanket and an id I had printed out at the library the night before because I was worried people wouldn’t know who I was without the swirly profile picture.

There were a solid 40 people at least, though I didn’t get an exact count and it varied over the hours. It was nice to get to see people, but my biggest takeaway was just how tall everybody was. I don’t know why but I had imagined everyone on cohost being just barely taller than Jae, when in actuality, many people there today were several inches taller than that.

It was nice to hear people suggest turning this into a…

A year ago, a new podcast came out, and with it brought me one of the silliest and most fun art projects I’ve ever been a part of. There’s plenty more art to come, but I wanted to do a bit of a review as I migrated and archived the old art from cohost onto here. Rather than filling up RSS feeds with over 50 drawings one at a time that many of you may have already seen, I’ve opted for this grid approach. Each one is clickable to go look at the original cohost post. Maybe I’ll update them to web-archive once cohost shuts down. Who knows?

Media Club Plus is a podcast by Friends at the Table and its premier season focused on Hunter X Hunter anime based on the manga by Yoshihiro Togashi. I’ve been listening to Friends at the Table for years, and I knew that the group behind Media Club Plus would be fun to listen to, even if I didn’t know anything about Hunter X Hunter (HxH). Part of the conceit of the podcast, after all, was that Jack De Quidt had also never watched the anime nor read the manga, so we would…

Today, my friend and I launched another new version of our puzzle game named Wizard Sokoban (working title). You can play it on itch.io for free, though it works best on a computer using firefox:

I wanted to take some time to discuss the journey we’ve been through getting here because I’m proud of what we’ve made so far and I’m excited for what it’ll be after we’ve applied another few rounds of polish.

Our second time game developing

In May of 2024, my friend Jules and I found ourselves simultaneously unemployed for the first time in our professional careers. With no structure to our days, we talked about some side projects that we’d been meaning to try out when we had more time. He mentioned wanting to try out Godot, and I mentioned that I had an idea for a puzzle game that could be pretty fun and simple to make.

We’ve been playing video games together for over a decade, and we most recently took on the idea of making our own when we went on a vacation to take part in Indie Train Jam 2017 from Chicago to Emeryville.¹ Surrounded by…

I’ve finally found the motivation to make a personal blog, and not a moment too soon. It’s slow going, but the RSS feed should work. For now, the feed just contains every post with no filtering options, but I’ll probably separate it out into individually-subscribable tag feeds before I post much else.

Part of why this all took so long was because I wanted to find a url that didn’t include my full name and that did allow me to do silly stuff with it, like the blog link being at “graham builds a blog” when you read the url without punctuation.