Foreward

Be Bad (In Public)

If you want to get better at something, be prepared to suck for awhile. Or a long time, if we’re being honest.

I’ve wanted to combine my love for RPGs, creative writing, technology, and cyberpunk for awhile now. But I don’t think of myself as a “good writer.”

The fastest way to fix that? Write more. Write a lot. Write all the time.

That’s what this is.

Terminal

It’s a project where I get to play a TTRPG, write, and explore cool ideas.

I’m using a game I bought from GilaRPG called “Rigged.” It uses a normal deck of cards, dice, and a Jenga tower to play through a hopeless situation: a hacker trying to take on a dangerous MegaCorp.

He’s doomed, of course. He has about a 1% chance of success.

And that’s kind of the point.

That’s the double-layered meaning of the “terminal” part of Terminal Recursion.

Terminal as in “utterly beyond hope, rescue, or saving” and the computer terminal that hackers use to break systems.

Fun bit of word play.

Recursion

The hacker will die again and again.

How does he keep coming back? No clue.

In fact, I don’t care.

Aeon Flux is deep in my nostalgia brain, and she dies in every episode of the first season. No mention of how she keeps coming back or the bigger picture.

I like that. Not everything needs to be 100% grounded in reality.

I have enough reality. This is my escape as well as the hacker’s.

Additionally, I once saw a piece of advice in an art book that stuck with me: draw one thing for a year.

That’s it. One thing. 365 days. Nothing else.

At first you draw your pre-conceived notion of whatever it is. Then you quickly run out of ideas. That’s when the creativity kicks in. You find fun ways to play with the idea. You mix in other stuff. You mess with different styles. Angles. Colors.

But the subject stays the same.

I did that with fists for awhile. I wanted to get better at painting on my iPad, so I only painted fists. Ninja Turtles, Winnie the Pooh, Dr. Strange, Optimus Prime; they all got the treatment.

While each one was fun, it was the process that was more important. Plus, my skills got way better. Double plus, I never got “creative block” wondering what to paint. The answer was always “another fist.”

Now I’m doing the same thing with my writing. When in doubt, “Put pr15m 8r34k through hell again.”

Simple.

Long Term Goal

Eventually I’d like this to be a coherent story / body of work. Maybe I’ll turn it into an email series where the book is written one email / chapter at a time.

I also want to do video updates about the procedural parts of the game, my “thinking out loud” moments as I figure out how to make sense of the process, and whatever else you might be interested in seeing.