The Canon

books music games their makers

The front page of this site catalogues what I build. This page records what built me. Every tool in the codex came out of a taste formed somewhere: a novel finished in one sitting, a record played until I could sing the quiet parts, a base torn down and rebuilt because the first layout was wrong. I am an archivist by temperament, and an archive is also a confession; you can read a person off their shelf. Here is mine, kept the way I keep everything: complete, sorted, and honest about the embarrassing parts.

I. Fiction

The fiction shelf runs dark, and I have stopped pretending otherwise. Joe Abercrombie writes violence like an accountant, every cut carrying a cost line, and the First Law books taught me that grimness and comedy share a spine. Terry Pratchett spent four decades smuggling humanism into jokes; Discworld runs forty-one volumes deep on my Calibre shelves, the longest series I own, and I regret none of the space. George Orwell is there for the essays more than the novels: prose as an instrument you can sight with. William Gibson described a future that arrived roughly on schedule. Frank Herbert’s Dune is the epic that punishes skimming and pays compound interest on attention. Neal Stephenson writes novels the way I write specs: the system is the story. Gene Wolfe I re-read rather than read; a second pass through the Book of the New Sun works like errata on the first. George R. R. Martin keeps consequence attached to every death, which is rarer in fantasy than it should be. Stephen King is the workhorse of the shelf, and I do not defend his volume; it does not need me.

Two further entries the canon cannot omit. The runner-up call-out goes to Brandon Sanderson: Mistborn and the Stormlight Archive, magic systems you can audit, rules visible from the outside and payoffs kept like debts. And R.A. Salvatore. Drizzt was a childhood favourite, and the books still do their one job: they go down easy. The shelf keeps candy on purpose.

II. Systems & Minds

Under the authors, the favourite-books shelf, restricted to writers not already named above. This shelf is about how minds and systems behave. Richard Adams’ Watership Down is an epic about rabbits that is secretly about exile, leadership, and founding a polity from nothing. Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money is the finance book I hand to people: behaviour first, spreadsheets second. Robert Cialdini’s Influence is the field manual for the persuasion machinery every human walks around inside; I read it the way security people read exploit write-ups, a catalogue of known attacks with live payloads. Poor Charlie’s Almanack, in its newest edition, is Charlie Munger’s case that judgment is a trainable skill assembled from every discipline you bother to learn.

III. Music

My one social filter is that genuine effort passes and performance fails. Pointed at music, it splits the shelf into two lanes.

The loud lane: Converge, whose Jane Doe is rage machined into precision. Self Defense Family, under both its names, Patrick Kindlon’s running sincerity experiment, a band that refuses to repeat itself on record or on stage. Brand New, arguing shame and faith at full volume. Manchester Orchestra, who mean the quiet parts of the loud-quiet dynamic. The Lawrence Arms, Chicago punk with a bartender’s wit.

The written lane: Eminem, flow as engineering. 50 Cent, economy of menace. Nas, density per bar, the writer’s writer. Vince Staples, deadpan laid over darkness until the deadpan becomes the joke. And Ka, the late Brooklyn firefighter who wrote verses like wills.

My music library is sorted and rated by hand. These ten survive every sort.

The record shelf holds sixty-one pieces, and thirty-eight of them have Patrick Kindlon’s name on them somewhere: Self Defense Family, End of a Year, Drug Church, and a fat row of splits. Converge stacks nine more, Jane Doe through The Dusk In Us, with a live DVD hiding among the wax. The rest of the shelf wanders: Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Jeff Buckley’s Grace, Old Gray’s an autobiography, a benefit compilation for an animal sanctuary, and, filed in the middle of the hardcore, two Taylor Swift records, 1989 and Midnights. Nobody said the filter only hears distortion.

Self Defense Family: I'm Going Through Some Shit b/w All Fruit is Ripe, Self Immolation Family b/w World Virgins, Live from Krazy Fest 5/20/11, The Corrections Officer in Me, You Are Beneath Her, Indoor Wind Chimes b/w Cottaging, Duets, I Tried to Make Something You Would Enjoy, Try Me, Two Genuine Oddities From Our Distant Past, German Industrial Ballads, Heaven is Earth, Talia b/w Taxying, When The Barn Caves In b/w Alan (7-inch), When The Barn Caves In b/w Alan (cassette), Colicky, Superior, BBC Session, Bastard Form b/w Maybe you Could Explain it to me, Have You Considered Punk Music?, wounded masculinity.
End of a Year: We Understand Europeans are a Sexual People, End of a Year, End of a Year / Segwei, I Heard Crime Gets you Off b/w To Your Scattered Bodies go, You Are Beneath Me.
Splits: Least Violent Time in Human History (with Axis), 4-way Split (with Code Orange Kids, The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die, and Tigers Jaw), Self Defense Family / Goodtime Boys Split, Stalwart Sons / Self Defense Family Split, Creative Adult / Self Defense Split, Self Defense Family / Meredith Hunter Split, Self Love (with Touche Amore), We'll All Be Reunited Under the Ground (with Null).
Drug Church: Drug Church, Paul Walker, Hit Your Head, Swell.
Converge: Jane Doe, No Heroes, All We Love We Leave Behind, Unloved and Weeded Out, Petitioning Forever, Live at the BBC, Thousands of Miles Between Us, You Fail Me Redux, The Dusk In Us.
The rest: Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada EP, Heavier Than Heaven, Lonelier Than God, Grace, Wacky Past is Now, Dialogues: A Benefit Compilation For Chenoa Manor Animal Sanctuary, Good Vibes, an autobiography, Joyce Manor, Spread Out, 1989, Flex Your Hair, Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress, Tigers Jaw, Midnights.

IV. Games

I came up through RPGCodex and Something Awful, and the list below reads like a refugee’s papers: seventy-two games across seven platforms, bucketed by console, each list in the order my file has always held them.

The old canon is all here, the CRPG lineage that crowd treats as scripture: Fallout, Fallout 2, New Vegas, Baldur’s Gate and its sequel, Planescape: Torment, Arcanum, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, Knights of the Old Republic 2, Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, and the modern inheritors doing the family proud, Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Disco Elysium. Caves of Qud and Dark Sun: Shattered Lands ride the same bloodline. Chris Avellone’s name is on more of these boxes than anyone else’s.

FromSoftware gets its own paragraph because the shelf is complete: Dark Souls 1, 2, and 3, the second one included without irony, Bloodborne, Elden Ring. Hidetaka Miyazaki builds games that refuse to care whether you finish them, and the refusal is the honesty I keep returning for.

The colony, factory, and map games are the professional deformation. I operate Dwarf Fortress, RimWorld, Oxygen Not Included, Factorio, Satisfactory, and Opus Magnum more than I play them, and the people behind them, Tarn and Zach Adams, Tynan Sylvester, Zach Barth, sit on my influences list where other people keep athletes. Crusader Kings 3, Victoria 3, Anno 1800, Civilization VI, and Battle Brothers run the same nerve at map scale; Gran Turismo 7, Kazunori Yamauchi’s database wearing a game’s clothes, closes the set.

The immersive sims hold the Looking Glass line: Deus Ex, Thief 2: The Metal Age, Dishonored, the two STALKERs, Gothic 2: Night of the Raven. Systems make the stories there, not scripts, and Warren Spector, who came up through Looking Glass and carried the idea to Deus Ex, is on the influences list too.

Then the narrative heavyweights: The Witcher 3, Kingdom Come: Deliverance and its sequel, Cyberpunk 2077, Subnautica, Hollow Knight, Stardew Valley, which Eric Barone built alone, NieR: Automata, Uncharted IV, The Last of Us, Titanfall 2, and Hideo Kojima across three PlayStation generations, Metal Gear Solid, The Phantom Pain, and Death Stranding.

Underneath all of it runs the JRPG spine, Final Fantasy IV, VI, VII, VIII, IX, and X with Chrono Trigger beside it, and the Yakuza machine, Yakuza 0 and the Kiwami remakes, Yakuza 6, and Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth plus the Judgment pair, Toshihiro Nagoshi’s soap opera of crime, the only open worlds I always finish because they are mostly about dinner.

PS5: Gran Turismo 7, Elden Ring, Grand Theft Auto V, Death Stranding, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Lost Judgment, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth.
PS4: Dark Souls 3, Uncharted IV: A Thief's End, The Last of Us Remastered, Bloodborne, Titanfall 2, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, NieR: Automata, Yakuza 6, Judgment, Yakuza Kiwami, Yakuza Kiwami 2, Yakuza 0, Yakuza: Like a Dragon.
PS2: Final Fantasy X.
PS1: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, Final Fantasy IX, Metal Gear Solid.
PC: Anno 1800, Crusader Kings 3, Victoria 3, Dark Sun: Shattered Lands, The Witcher 3, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Dwarf Fortress, RimWorld, Satisfactory, Factorio, Disco Elysium, Fallout, Fallout 2, Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate 2, Diablo 2, Warcraft 2, Age of Empires 2, Deus Ex, STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, STALKER: Call of Pripyat, Thief 2: The Metal Age, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, Gothic 2: Night of the Raven, Oxygen Not Included, Dark Souls Remastered, Fallout: New Vegas, Dishonored, Battle Brothers, Caves of Qud, Dark Souls 2, Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, Civilization VI, Stardew Valley, Subnautica, Cyberpunk 2077, Divinity: Original Sin 2, Planescape: Torment, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2, Opus Magnum, Euro Truck Simulator 2, Arcanum, Hollow Knight.
SNES: Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger.
NES: Romance of the Three Kingdoms II.

The board shelf runs the same nerve at table scale, nineteen games deep. Uwe Rosenberg’s engines, Agricola, Caverna: Cave vs Cave, Patchwork, and A Feast for Odin, are Factorio for the kitchen table: feed the machine, tighten the machine, lose to the machine. Martin Wallace’s Brass: Birmingham plays that loop in canal-era England. Antoine Bauza’s 7 Wonders and its Duel offshoot, the latter with Bruno Cathala, Matt Leacock’s Pandemic and On the Brink, and R. Eric Reuss’s Spirit Island take the dinner-table and co-op shifts. The card games fill the gaps: Jaipur, Sushi Go!, Ticket to Ride: New York, Wingspan, Railroad Ink Challenge, Exploding Kittens, and the accidentally horrifying Here, Kitty, Kitty! And two entries are barely board games at all: Mörk Borg, Pelle Nilsson and Johan Nohr’s doom-metal RPG, Nohr sitting on my influences list for exactly this art direction, and Thousand Year Old Vampire, a solo journaling RPG about a vampire outliving every person it loves.

The canon changes rarely and only by conviction: things earn their place or they stay off. Everything on the front page is downstream of this page.

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