YUM0
A personal archive of stories, field notes, essays, game journals, and collected experiences.
Sections
Servus Dei Custoditus
Latest Stories
THE SANDBOX STATE
An Ethnography of New Eden
Contents
Chapter 1. Entering New Eden and the Formation of a Sandbox Society,
2003-2006
Some ideas can only be understood by leaving the desk. Expeditions is the record of that — the trips taken not for leisure but for evidence: the site visit, the interview in a language you’re only half-fluent in, the data collected standing in the rain because the instrument couldn’t wait for better weather. This is where the mess of real fieldwork gets written down before it’s sanded into a tidy report somewhere else — the wrong turns, the local who explained more in five minutes than the literature did in five papers, the moment a hypothesis quietly died on contact with reality. If you’ve ever come back from a trip with more questions than you left with, you already know the feeling this section is built around.
The honest one, if only because it says what it is right in the name. Featured Partners is clearly marked space for paid or collaborative content — a boundary drawn on purpose so the rest of the site doesn’t have to wonder where the line is. Done well, it’s a place where sponsorship and genuine usefulness aren’t at odds; done badly, it’s the section readers learn to skip. Naming it plainly, rather than dressing it up as something else, is what keeps the trust intact everywhere else.
The section without a hook, because it doesn’t need one — this is just the writing. Personal essays, short fiction, the pieces that don’t fit a beat or a format and exist purely because something needed to be said in sentence form. Narratives is less a category than a home base: the place other sections borrow their tone from when they’re at their best. It asks the most of both writer and reader, and it’s usually where the writer would point first if asked what they’re actually proud of.
Two moods sharing one roof. Punditry is the straight take — an actual argument, made in good faith, about the state of things. Parody is what happens when the straight take isn’t enough, when the news has already outpaced satire and the only honest response left is to exaggerate it further. Together they let a writer be serious and ridiculous in the same week, sometimes the same piece, without pretending those are contradictions. This is the section with the most risk in it — the one likeliest to make someone close the tab — and also, often, the most alive.
The name says it plainly: you die, you come back, you try again — and somewhere in that loop is the whole appeal of games as a subject worth writing about. Respawn isn’t a scoreboard or a review column; it’s closer to a journal kept between sessions, tracking not just what happened in the game but what it stirred up outside of it. A boss fight that mirrored a bad week. A slow, wandering open world that taught patience nobody asked for. The pleasure of a genre you’re embarrassed to admit you love. This section treats games as worth the same reflective attention as a book or a film — maybe more, since you actually had to survive them.
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