Donnovan's Website

Recent Blog Entries

2026-09-12 - Antichamber Still Holds Up

When Antichamber released back in 2013 it was, in the creator’s own words, an overnight success seven years in the making. The game was phenomenal, and thanks to a great deal of effort in marketing and networking it became an instant icon in the indie gaming scene and the kind of commercial success which allows an indie developer to decide to never do all that again. As a long-time Minecraft player since well before I was purchasing games myself, I personally remember a great deal of effort being put into in-game recreations of some of the earliest and most iconic puzzles that whole year after release. But when I tried playing Antichamber myself, at a much younger age, I wasn’t able to do the creative thinking necessary to progress very far through the game.

Recently, completely on a whim, I sat down with Antichamber again and played it through to the end across about two weeks and a handful of sittings. I can say pretty confidently that even a full 13 years later it’s still a game that’s very worth playing, and it’s certainly my favorite puzzle game out of the three I’ve played this year (the others being Viewfinder, which has some fantastic puzzles and a story that utterly ruins the entire game, and Manifold Garden, which I enjoyed until I tried to work out the secret ending). I’ll note that while I’m aware that games don’t actually “get worse” as time goes on, and there’s nothing wrong with older games in the slightest, what I mean when I say that is that nothing in the gaming space has made Antichamber any less exciting in retrospect than it was on release. I would go so far as to say that Antichamber may still be one of the best first-person puzzlers ever made, and it’s definitely among the top ranks by any metric.

2026-09-07 - Making My Own Discord Bot

Happy Labor Day! To celebrate, let’s talk about some work I’ve been doing this past week. I apologize to anyone who doesn’t find these kinds of dry technical details interesting.

For a while now I’ve been running my own little Discord bot off an old Android tablet I had lying around. The poor thing got replaced and was just sitting on a shelf, and when I eventually had cause to spin up my own bot I remembered about it and decided to see if it was possible to run discord.py through Termux. As it turned out, it was, and although it was a little unreliable sometimes it served its job quite well. I stole an existing application from an older webhook used for a personal Minecraft server back in 2018 to be the face of it, and she’s been running with pretty serviceable uptime for a little over a year.

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The problem with using discord.py is that while I’m perfectly capable of writing Python code, I don’t find it very comfortable. I suspect the part of the language I have the most trouble with is the significant whitespace, but whatever it is, while I had initially had intentions of adding other features (primarily a deck handler for Eidolon: Become Your Best Self 2E for a campaign which is no longer running), after a time I just stopped working on it and left the bot where it was. Within the last couple of weeks I found myself thinking about adding features again due to a conversation about a type of bot a different, unrelated friend would would like to have in his own server, and I decided that it was about time to finally do something about the problem. [...]

2026-08-31 - Wanting to blog more regularly + Further Improvements

The fact is I don't use this blog nearly enough. I've got this weird blocker in my mind that I should only put "important" stuff here, so I don't write anything I've been interested in lately or talk about recent life experiences or anything like that. That's pretty sad for a blog, especially since the first blog entry here is just me rambling about The Blue Channel. I'd like to start writing things here more often, so I'll try to begin being more mindful of it. I already have a fair handful of topics backed up that would be very worth writing blog entries about, which is part of why I'm working on this one again. [...]

2025-03-28 - How the Wicked Website Was Made

I love the promises made by static website generators. The ability to write your website piecemeal, automatically including headers and footers and pesudo-dynamic elements wherever they're needed without handwriting or copy-pasting, makes for a fundamentally better experience than writing an entire website by hand. I don't especially envy anyone who's set themselves the task of writing a website from scratch without the use of external tools. Having done enough of it myself to last me for some time, I'd like something easier to use. [...]